30+ Black Friday Tips to Win the Holidays Like a 9-Figure Ecommerce Brand

we're really welcome to the operators podcast. We have an amazing action pack tip filled black Friday summer Monday episode coming at you. We're going to talk about Upsell offers, bundles, AOVs, how to how to pace your calendars. Really, I can't even unpack all these tips right now because you're going to be so many of them. They're going to come fast. They're going to come loose. They're going to come ready for you. We have the core for me, Jason, Mike, Matt, Matt. How are you doing today? Dude, I'm I'm loving life right now. It's great. I went to Vegas for 36 hours this week. You know, it's hot as hell. Now I'm back in my cold ass place. It's great. Life's awesome. Dude, and you're you're slinging wings. We want the wings black Friday playbook, man. We got up. We got to figure out how to actually scale that thing. Mike, how are you doing, brother? I'm awesome. It was 115 degrees last week at this time. And it is a cool 100 outside right now. So I'm doing great. I'm fired up to talk about black Friday with you guys. Okay. Well, Jason, how's the weather where you are? It's the year of crazy weather. I'm in Florida right now. There was an insane thunderstorm and the in the street out there is like totally flooded. So we're whatever. Glad on here. We'll do it might be storming outside. It's about to be storming in our businesses guys. It's black Friday. I hope everyone has a hot and heavy tip for these people. I'm going to go first. Here's a tip for everybody out there. Black Friday is coming up. You want to make sure you're set up for success. But sometimes things don't go to plan. Have a backup promotion. Okay. We've we've had to do this maybe three years ago, maybe 2024. We had a hard black Friday. We wanted to go out there with $76 wallets. We had a midway through mark around $69 to make the ads work. So have a what I call like first tier promo. The promo you want to go out there and actually hit. But if things go bad, have a backup promo. Something else to throw on the fire. Something else to sweeten the pot, the juice. Have you guys ever had experience doing that? Yes. I mean, like this happened to us very recently, actually, where I don't know what the team decided to do. I mean, it literally wasn't even involved. Like we have a process and I know they're like yoloing trying something new and it did not. It was not yet, you know, it was not good. So we went back to one of the old, you know, one of the greatest hits, right? So you got to have your greatest hits. So to speak, you just be prepared. If you want to try something new, that's fine. But like, be prepared to revert to one of your greatest hits. Then, you know, on top of that, like pivot fast, if you have to, right? Like because you just you're just wasting days. If you don't, we build out two full sets of creative for black Friday offers. So like two different campaign offers, full set of creative, just in case we and we load both into our ad accounts. Sean, I'm sure you guys do the same thing. We keep one off. So it's all approved creative, because that's a big thing. Like make sure it's all in there and it's approved because, you know, get slower to approve. I don't know if they had changes that this year. And then the other thing, Sean, if I could piggyback off what you're saying, if you're going to make ad creative for these peak moments, it's usually a good idea to make a bunch that don't have the actual offer in the creative. And that makes it a little more evergreen, a little more reusable. So like you get a banger black Friday ad and it's for a $74 wallet. Now you're selling them for $69. Like don't put the number in the ad. Just make, make a better ad. When we had a pivot, maybe it was 2020, just 2022, 2024. I can't remember. We did not have backup ads. We were, we were late night photoshopping. Thursday night Thanksgiving, trying to be like, OK, well, we got to change the offer or whatever, trying to figure out how to work. I think that's a great idea. With AI, it's super easy. Just, you know, you have static statics are going to perform really well. Just have a couple different variations in there. And I got, we're talking about bonus tips right now. Here's another bonus tip. If you've brands been around for a while, go back to the creator from 2020, 2021, 2022. You probably have bang or ad ideas in there. Just turn them back on. Just like maybe adjust them a little bit. You know, Jason brought up the greatest hits. So often our businesses are just playing the greatest hits in front of the biggest crowd, which is black Friday. Well, don't go, don't be ashamed to go back to this 2023 ad catalog and just pull something forward. So we talk about this all the time. Spotlight bias, spotlight bias is that basically like you think people are paying way more attention to you than they are. Nobody remembers what you did two years ago. They don't remember what you did last week. But inside the company, it's so there's such a draw of like doing something new or creative. And this is one of the ways where your team often is not going to be aligned with what customers want that it's like, oh, we need to do this fresh thing or we did that just a few months ago, like you should go to what works. This should be your tried and true stuff. And I think actually black Friday is a really good time to experiment on the margins to learn for future periods because you get such a short window. And then when it's gone, it's gone. So you should find some ways to be running some smaller experiments. But like you said, Sean, this is a time to hit all of your absolute core competencies, the offers that you know work, the creatives that you know work. It's not it's not a time to be experimenting with large parts of your budget or your offer. You're probably not doing this, but you have to have a backup offer ready to go. In case if it's the fan, you want to be able to turn to a better offer or a worse offer if things are going too well, have those backup offers ready, designed, and ready to launch. Oh my god, worse offer is such a good one. Yeah, well, that's what I was talking about in the webinar is like you need to know your supply chain. And like if you're blowing it out, it's not helpful if you're just giving up full margin sales two weeks from now. So like you need to know like the speed you need to be going at Mike, what's your tip? I think you actually have to be ready with a worse offer also, which doesn't even make any sense on the face of it. But here's the thing, you have to have your supply chain kind of buttoned up. You need to know what you have in inventory, how many weeks of cover, what's your ability to fulfill and deliver? You know what'll absolutely destroy your margins from Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a bunch of refunds or a bunch of people not getting their stuff in time for Christmas. We do this, we have the same problem with back to school, we have one back to school where we blew it out and then we gave all the profit away when people didn't get their backpacks in time for school. Same thing, like you got a hard stop date, people need these gifts. So I would say you really have to know how much inventory we have, what pace do we need to be selling things at? And that you have to be able to kind of speed up or decelerate. So sometimes you come out of a gate and you're like, man, this is working way too well. We're going to sell out of everything by December 10th. That doesn't make any sense. We need to actually make the offer a little bit worse or we need to actually, you know, set the roas goals a little bit higher on on the marketing. So you need to know what pace is a good pace for how you're set up. Listen, this takes months to get ready for. You can't decide that you're just going to do 50% more because you're feeling good on Thursday night and you're all full of Turkey. You've got to actually know what your business can maintain. And then you got to pace it. I have a video test. I'm guy with a belly hammering buttons and Facebook. It's just I want to make more money. I want to make more money. No, and we've we've had to do that, right? Like we've had hit products actually just ended being breakout successes. And you want to lean into it, but we look at the weeks to cover it. It's like, oh, look, we're going to sell out anyway. It's like, we have to actually turn all the ads for us off. We have to remove the promo of this because if you're going to sell it anyway, sell it at full price, right? And it's a great way to save margin. Now we'll go to Jason. Jason, what tip you got for us? Yeah, listen, people. The hay is in the barn. Okay. Don't overspend. Like the funnel should be full by now. And don't media buyers. They want to spend money. Jason, let me ask you a question. Well, meta take your money if you try and give it to them. Yes, they will take it. They will take whatever you will spend. Your meta ref is actually compensated based on how much you spend. Yes, but like, forget about the meta ref. Think about your media buyers. You know, I mean, they love flexing on Twitter about how they they scaled spend. Oh, we spent this much. They they shouldn't measure their success based on how much they spend. But seriously, right? Like people are ready to buy. And the funnel should be full by now. And so it's just it's a really, I mean, this is very difficult, right? Like this is and you never know what what's right or what's wrong. You just got to find like you got to bookend it, right? You got to have like a sweet spot and you got to say, okay, here's here's how far I'm going to go no matter what and here's how low I'm going to go no matter what. Because like we had this last year, I remember I remember being in the text chain with my teen and one guy saying spend spend spend and two of us saying no, no, no, the work is done here. Like it's just not incremental, right? So this is like I just think, you know, it's just people just going to overspend. It's not incremental and and don't like take the win. Don't don't don't get crazy. Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but post group does. I run two post script AI products at Ridge, both show up on our PNL. Infinity testing runs continuous AB tests on our SMS automations completely in the background. It's driven $446,000 in incremental revenue, not just attributed incremental. That's a 32 X incremental row as with click the rates up 43%. Then there's shopper and AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23 X ROI on messaging cost of loan. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to postscript.io and book a free demo. It should be your most efficient time of the year. November and December are most efficient months in terms of MER and it's like don't don't blow it. It's like it there's You're seeing the sales come in if you're typically running the two acts. you're like, dude, we could spend more. Take the three X, take the four X, if you can get it, because that's the most profitable month of the year. Matt, what tip do you got for us? You should spend into the conversion leg before the weekend. So like, we had to look, we learned this lesson. I wouldn't say the hard way, but it was really interesting watching both the, I guess the demand curve or the capture curve of Pila, which was very much like Black Friday Cyber Monday heavy and then a little slower after. More impulse purchasing, more repeat driven, and then Lomi, which was like heavy, heavy gift with long consideration window. For us, and I've seen this now on a bunch of brands, our one day click roast during this time jumps like 40%, right? And then our 30 day get jumps even more. So we actually had to preload demand for Lomi ahead of Black Friday. And then we would just slowly take away spend as we got closer to Christmas, because it was such a giftable product. Whereas Pila, we would spend into this much shorter conversion window. So we would hit the, you know, Thursday, whatever. We would just start ramping at spend and looking against our Arleys, because we were just trying to capture like people just impulse buying. So I would say you want to really know consideration window and those one day and then lagging, you know, whether that's a seven day or 30 day, they're going to go up because time compresses at this time of year. Like people will make faster decisions. Dude Matt, it's a great tip and it's going to tag on to my secondary tip, which is the sales need to start earlier. So everyone sitting around rating for Friday, and they'll have maybe me, I'll start my sale Thursday. No, you should start your sale at least the Sunday before. So you have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Those days are all massive. We are Wednesdays, a multi-million dollar day. Thursdays even bigger, Fridays even bigger. Then it kind of tapers off Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday ended being probably the biggest day of them all. But like, you should start your, it should be over a week of sales. And everyone hates doing that. Everyone wants to have like the big firework show or you talk to brands who like, you know, we're actually going to discount. We're just going to do it on just Black Friday or whatever. It's like, now dude, people start shopping way earlier than you think. And this Black Friday is later than it historically is. I think this Black Friday is on the 28th this year, right? So, you know, it can be as early as the 23rd. So it ends up being, we're missing a week worth of sales. Right when the leaves start changing, bro, people want to start buying stuff for Christmas and holidays. Have that sale ready? I start those sales earlier. What do you guys think about that? We'll go to Mike. Totally agree. We have seen some of our best performance on deals, for example, on Amazon when you do pre deals or when you keep a deal that really did well going post deal. Like, it's really simple. When you're trying to do the exact same thing that everybody else is trying to focus on, it's just going to be tough for a sledding. And so a lot of times just being very close to the deal period that everybody's looking to buy and being a little bit early or a little bit late, you can harvest a lot of demand. This is true around things like Prime Day, but it's especially true. I mean, in fact, Amazon internally calls us to Turkey 10. They don't call it Black Friday Cyber Monday. They're just like, it's Turkey 10. Because to them, it's like this 10-day period of really big demand to harvest. To your point, Sean, I think we had one of our biggest deals that we've ever had on Amazon happened on a Wednesday night right before Thanksgiving. So like, there's a lot of opportunity there. I would encourage everybody to not get so down then on those four days that you miss all of the opportunity on the Halo days on either side. Yeah. And to Matt's point, the more time you give that creative, the better the creative will perform. If you're trying to run Thursday and Friday only creative, right, or Friday and Monday only creative, it's just not going to have enough time to mature, get impressions and get that data on the ads and ads at. So give yourself more time, launch those ads early. Jason, anything you want to add to that? Yeah, definitely want to add to that. First of all, some people, they are just shopping on Black Friday, right? That's it. Maybe over the weekend. But there's a ton of other people that are shopping sooner. In fact, a lot of brands start really, really early. But clearly, you just have to know that. We've seen it every year. Black Friday always crushes, but there's so much demand to capture before that. So it's like, there's some consumers that will pay regular price when they want something and others are waiting for a deal. And they're just going to be some of those guys that they're like, they're just like Black Friday is the day where I know I'm going to get the best deal and I'm going to wait. And but there are a ton of people shopping before that. One thing that we've done that works really well is we prepare other like exclusive drops or deal drops in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. So like, just to try to cap, like, so like, not going to be our hero offer. But we'll have, I don't know, like all of our reject products. So we used to have cases that just would look a little weird because they wouldn't print well. And we would sell people the waste, literally built a campaign around like, hey, do you want to buy our waste? And we would run that as like staff picks and fun things three weeks before Black Friday. So you're still capturing demand, right? You're still running kind of deals to get those people. But it wasn't going to be the hero offer. That's going to go to my third tip in point about how to actually structure calendars. But don't worry. Now we're going to hit that. Do you got who's got a second tip for me? I've got a banger stat for you guys. 17% of holiday shopping, holiday e-commerce shopping happens Thanksgiving this Cyber Monday. 17%. It matters. It's not the whole thing. And it just emphasizes the point that you were making Sean that it's like, you need to use this to like also set up being really excellent in the days around it because that's going to be the majority of your sales if you're anything like the national average. Our last day shipping cut off is typically as big as Black Friday. So we're talking about a multi multi million dollar day on the 15th 16th or 17th of December. So you can capture a ton of revenue that entire period. If you're scaling any commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough after self focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post purchase moment into more profit monetize every order with post purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise grade tech used by gap ticket master macy's and target now driving results for brands like true classic Hexclad Ridge and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pants from Hexclad instead of two. Aftersell is already generated over one billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands. Revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cat. So check out aftersell and tell them that the operator sent you. That's a great stat. Mike Jason, you had another tip for us. If you're running an income business, if you're running a retail business, if you care about Black Friday, you need to be focused on the Panzer 5. That's it. The Panzer 5 is the checklist that you need. Get your offers right. Set your budgets and pivot points on the budget. Demand planning leading up needs to be dialed. Get your creatives ready, your ads, your website, and then finally make sure that ops is ready to roll. They need to ship that stuff. So make sure they're ready to roll. That is the Panzer 5. That's how I am running our business. This year, it's I've done it every year. This is how we do Black Friday. Dude, and those are great five tips. If you need those tips, go ahead and follow Jason on social. He's going to tweet out those five tips for you. Or subscribe to the newsletter. The newsletter is going to have those tips for you ready to go. Mike's got a tip for us. Hit it, Mike. If you can find a way to personalize items, this is a great time to do it. People love when they're giving gifts. They love them to be personalized. This is engraving. This is embroidery. And if you don't have a way to do it in your business, look for ways to do it. Sometimes this is ways of creating bundles that feel more personalized for a particular type of persona. But this is increasingly going to be the trend. People want personalization. They want things that feel like they were designed for them. Look for ways to incorporate it in your business. For us, that's been embroidery and engravering, which has been a huge boom. We just bought I think four more embroidery machines. I think we have 12 or 14 at this point. And they were busy every hour of every day during the back to school period. I just see Mike like sewing and stuff. I was glad I wasn't doing it by hand anymore. Right. So I'm like, guys, we got to get a machine here. I'm fast. But come on. But yeah, like seriously, look for it guys. There's great opportunities. And the other thing on this is that there's just not that many people out there that do personalization very well. There are a few. Our friend Todd runs several companies that do a great job at this. But there's just not very many people that do it because it's a lot of complexity. And you're always looking for ways to stand out from everybody else in e-commerce. It's just wanting to drop ship stuff. Just trying to do minimum viable. It's shipping it from overseas. When you start to implement things like engraving and embroidery and personalization, all of a sudden you're in a smaller and smaller group of people that you're competing with. And if you can do it with excellence, there's big money there. I totally agree. We bought that watch factory. We were making wallets there. Terrace hit. It's basically pivoted to a full engraving and UV printing shop at this point. We're doing thousands of orders. Corporate giftings a big part of that. But yeah, I love personalization. So yeah, if you don't have a UV printer, everybody listening to this, you should just go look up UV printers. Like there's a really simple example. In a place you wouldn't expect it. My son has started a business where he's buying and selling Legos on what not. And I'm like, hey ma'am, there's not a lot of margin because you don't control the supply chain. And so he's figured out some ways to buy them at discounts. He's making the numbers work. But you know where the real money is in selling Legos? It's people that are buying Lego parts and they are doing custom UV printing on them. And then there are. it up, you know, six X. That's actually the people that are making really good money. So, like, I'm seeing this across a bunch of different industries. The like 3D printers, UV printers, like all this stuff, it's becoming increasingly affordable, increasingly easy to operate. Be thinking about, hey, is there a way to incorporate that in our business? Totally. All right. We're going to Matt. Matt has something hot and fresh for us. Do you know, I just realized the thing I freaking tell my team every year, it's whatever the number of emails in SMS that you said you're going to send, you should send more. Like, we're not sending it up. This is like the one time of year you have permission to be annoying as a brand. And too many people think that like, don't know, I can't send four emails on a day. It's like, yes, you can. You can send more. It's this one time year. You have full permission from everyone to send more email. Yeah. Let's double click on what Matt just said. He said four times a day. If you're not thinking about multiple emails a day, you're behind the curve. Matt's going to be, Matt's going to hit people up about every 15 minutes for 36 hours. We covered some great tips. Who's got another one for us before we talk about calendars? The best back Friday offers don't just increase orders. They increase AOV a couple of years in a row or a few years in a row. We've just come up with bigger and bigger bundles. It's like, it's shocking how many people how many people buy that, you know, like buy these massive bundles. So I would just say like, when you're looking at offer thing, make sure you're thinking about increasing AOV. It's a great tip. I think Matt had another one for us. Yeah. This is not a offer or how to sell more tip. This is a team tip. You have to, I really think this is a momentum time of year and you should celebrate like hell. So like the day of if things are going well, we just choose this as a time to have so much fun. It's hilarious to watch these numbers. Jason, when those numbers start to rip for you guys, that's a great feeling. So we would put TVs up in the office. We would have real-time hourly trackers. People could see it. Not only that, you adjust much quicker when it's in front of everyone. But the celebration side of this is actually just a riot. Dude, I think it's, I think it's a great tip. Take $10,000 by gift cards and $100 increments and throw those things out like you're throwing candy out of parade. Yeah. Oprah, Oprah, you're Black Friday. There you go. You get, you get a card. Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm in loving what Rich panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made a practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script. There AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it. It works. It's freaking amazing. Rich panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like a dollar to three dollars, which is low nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com/demo not for some generic demo, but do actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. This is when it's time to take your team to Chili's. Get an old time our burger. Add cheese, splurge guys. Like if you want to get the brownie ice cream thing at the end, that's okay. Calories don't even count on Black Friday. It's a magical like international waters. You really should like celebrate the wins because like it's always on to the next one, on to the next one. And also like if you go really big during Black Friday Cyber Monday, there's going to be a lot of work to actually like get that stuff out the door. So like you have to take the time to like celebrate with your team. Love the tip. Big shout out to all the three PLs out there. We talk a lot about three PLs. We beat them up, but I don't do my own fulfillment. I don't think any of us are doing our large scale fulfillment anymore. Three PLs are the backbone of Black Friday. If you're if you're doing 10,000 order days or whatever, it's like someone's got actually put boxes. So shout out three PLs. Make sure you send them and give cards too. Oh, and here's a simple thing. Be their favorite customer because like that stuff matters. Yeah, agencies too, guys. Like the media buyers. So if you don't do your internal media buying, your agency, these people are staying up all hours of the day. And most of what they're getting is people being like, Hey, why does this suck? Why is it not spending what I think it should spend? Why are we not hitting this? Celebrate your partners. Service agencies. This is we've talked about this before, but it's a great time to say it again. Like service agencies basically all they hear is people's problems and people's unhappiness. If you're their client that's telling them, I appreciate you. How can I help? You're giving them good communication. Guess who's going to get prioritized? Guess who's going to get the best level of service? Like this is just how people work. Dude, these are all great tips. Also, don't be scared to be the most annoying client. You may be in micro and pull around to the spectrum there. It's a real good cop bad cop thing. I try and follow Sean around and use the exact same vendor. So I can be their favorite. And then Sean can be the least favorite. Okay, I got I got a great tip for everybody. This is true alpha. If you've made it 20 minutes in the pod and you're waiting for that real alpha, it's okay. This is all fluff. Where's the real alpha? Here it is, guys. Do more guests with purchase. So we do a holiday gift bag that costs 50 cents to make. The value on that gift bag to a customer is 20 to 30 dollars. It's a beautiful gift bag. And it solves a problem for them. There are people are buying rituals to give us gifts. Now we have an awesome bag for it. They could be a little name tag on it or whatever. The perceived value is really, really high. It acts as a promo. It acts as a nubble reason to purchase. And Ridge was built on when we called no brain or offers. It's like an offer so good you wouldn't want to buy from anywhere else. Gifrith purchase helps you complete that. So that's the true alpha tip. Take that. Maybe it's too late to get those gift bags going for you, but it's a great tip. The best way to win black Friday that nobody does is to use it at a time to become your vendor's favorite customer. There is so much alpha and being likeable. And all it takes is intentionality and using your words and appreciating people's work. And yet most people, they're so in the grind. They're so focused on the numbers. They're not doing it at all. And you know what people remember? They remember people who were kind of them and good to them went during stressful moments. This is a stressful moment. It's a perfect opportunity. Hey, it's simple. Pull out your phone. Just send a text. Hey, I know you're busy really right now, but we really appreciate you. We appreciate everything you do for the business. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. You do that with your key, you know, your key agencies, your three PL, these people that are making your business possible. Like, hey, someone your manufacturing partners, hey, we're having a huge day. Let's celebrate. This couldn't have happened without you. I think about it like this. Credit is free. You can give credit for the success of your brand, who has many people as you want to. And the reason why we don't is our own insecurity and our own arrogance. Be generous with credit. People love being able to be associated with something that's going really well. And they love feeling appreciated. And it'll turn up in all kinds of unexpected ways that it comes back to you. Okay, this is a fun one and it's more about how do I stay in front of our customers? We buy an extra phone and we turn it on. We plug it in and we turn it on Instagram live and we leave it on for days. And it's all it is guys is like a cardboard box. Right? That's got like our offer on it. And that keeps us in Instagram in the leftmost bubble on the top thing for stories. Because that means that you are live and live always takes priority over every other story. And find ways to have fun with it. Our team will show up and they'll wave it people and works every year. Dude, Matt, that is a great practical hack. I'm going to call that a tip and we're called that a hack, dude. People want sauce. There it is. Okay. I love seeing it. Because that actually lines up with my next tip. And this is more Gen Z focus is more TikTok shop focused. Plan your lives right now. If you don't have a live schedule like designed and ready to go by October 5th, it's not going to happen. Like you need to have people going live Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You need to book off two to four hours every single day where there's an agency going live. Because if you're selling on TikTok, you know they tell you that they want lives to be important. And if you're doing lives, you'll be prioritized in the feed. People are going to be watching football. People are going to be at whatever and scrolling. You're going to want to show up on that live plan those lives right now. We have just started to embrace that and it's really working for us. And it's why I'm able to grow 40 or 50 percent every single month this year. Embrace TikTok shop embrace live plan those right now. Live is a future. The decision makers have spoken TikTok is saying we are prioritizing this. What not is hitting these crazy valuations. The future is going to be alive. The quicker your team makes the transition, the quicker you start, I don't even think that your idea is great, Matt. But like I would take it a step further. It's like you should have people doing the live for several hours on all of these days. Because that's where everything's going. Go ahead and build the muscle now. Be at the forefront of this and not a late adopter. We've been a late adopter on some of this stuff. That's on us. That's on me. But you can always pick now to be the time where you go from being a lagger to being at the front, right? And we know where it's going. It's going towards live shopping. It's going towards these more interactive formats. People want connection. Like you Sean said, the screen time, I'm sure all of our screen times are a total dumpster fire during the holidays. Everybody is scrolling. Everybody is looking for something interesting to look at. Have your brand be one of the people that shows up and and gives them something interesting to engage with. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D to see any commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all-in-one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally. And most you listen to this right now, either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second you're 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other on real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs, you don't know your real margin, you're reconciling spreadsheet to 11pm trying to figure out what $40k is what. I know, because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement, it's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up, 4D to see, and it's not some bivocated piece of crap. Believe me, those exist, Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill, tell him Sean's saying. Alright guys, we're firing just rapid fire tips at you. Bam, bam, bam, bam, okay, who's got another one? What else we want to talk about calendars? I always think about Black Friday versus Cyber Monday, and you know, what's the difference really? And I think you can, I don't know if you guys do this, but I feel like you should do something different, right? Really do something different on Cyber Monday, and get people to come, give them a reason to come back. And like for us, it's a little bit difficult because it's just the way our product was working, et cetera, et cetera. But it's like, you know, maybe you just need, maybe we, and you guys could give me a little advice here, maybe we need to just like, put some firepower into certain other things on Cyber Monday so that people will come back, right? What do you think? Well, me and Connor always disagree about this. Connor's a big fan of varied offers throughout the weekend. I want to have a simple, easy to understand, great value offer that you hit from Sunday to Tuesday. Like the Sunday before Black Friday to the Tuesday after Cyber Monday. It's like an 11-day period, 10-day period, whatever it is, I just want to hit that as much as possible with the simple offer. Connor likes switching it up. He likes putting more things on sale, having doorbusters, whatever. I think there's no right or wrong way right now. If you're a high-repeat brand and you're going to have people come back, that's great. Don't make it so complex that they can't understand what the hell the offer is. This is why I hate the 12 days of Christmas offer where every day is different because people don't pay attention to your brand. Imagine seeing a post for an offer and then you're like, yeah, you can't get that anymore. That was the second day of Christmas offer, just frustrating. It's a bad experience. Matt, what do you guys think? We used to do that 12 days of Christmas. It's like, every year, I'm like, this is a freaking art project. This is not marketing. You're doing this for yourselves. Nobody gives about us for 12 freaking days. Hell, yes, Sean. I've got a derivative of this, which is the FCM is the time to sell a ton of your best stuff. And the problem that we've done in the past, don't be stupid, like Mike, is it can be easy to be like, "Hey, we're running a sale. What is everything we're heavy on in inventory that we want to get out of?" That's, there's a great time to do it, right? We're on sale. Don't do that. Take your best things and push those and put your discounting in your offers around your best things. It's so simple and so straightforward. But also, it's so easy to think, well, I've got to get lighter on inventory. And this is the right time to do it. I actually don't think these huge swell sale periods are the right time to reduce your inventory exposure. There's a time to absolutely blow it out on your very best stuff. If you have a long tail of TJ Maxx as your friend, go ahead and call them up. They'll take whatever you want. And they'll pay you basically what it costs you to make it. So TJ Maxx is your friend there. This is an event that's about throughput. If you actually want to make a ton of money, you want to focus on black wallets and black water bottles and black phone cases and just get a ton of throughput on the things people already want and buy, give them a good offer and just drive that home. I love that tip. Jason, I love your tip. Think about things different way. Matt, you brought some fire tips. And last call, guys, what do we got cooking? Don't ignore the post purchase upsell at this time of year. I will say like we've gotten like incremental dollars out of our businesses over the years by just doing that work ahead of time, having it dialed ahead of time. And then having pretty good bonuses post purchase, you'll get extra money. We just trust a million dollars in your to date upsell revenue via after sell by rocked the response or this podcast, all the stuff we do, we love those guys. And I've driven a real million dollars in incremental revenue via a little widget on my website to check out. So use it. I mean, you can get millions of dollars driving through your website that you would otherwise miss. Okay, Matt, you got a tip for us. This is a dumb one. I may sound dumb charge more for express shipping. At this time here, like you can pick up an extra couple bucks, guys, like people are like, you know, they really want your thing. And you're charging, let's say 12 bucks for express shipping, like make it 14. It's not going to matter. We should have a whole episode on on shipping profiles going into. Oh, we can talk for oh, yes, because I think people actually overspend on fast shipping when you don't need to. If somebody's buying December 2nd, they really want that package by December 24th. So it's like no reason to give them free express shipping because it's a Christmas purchase. Now, if somebody's buying on the 18th, you actually have to give them free two day shipping for it to show up on time. So it's actually a ladder where I think we give away too much free shipping early and not enough in the later period. And actually, as a rule, Ridge has no overnight shipping because it never works. If you ever want to get the earliest customer ever in the most expensive package, do overnight shipping, I hate that stuff. No, I think you're right. I think it's the right offer as you get to that December 18th to 21st, 22nd period is like, hey, free express shipping is is a banger offer. And that's going to draw people in on Amazon, the numbers, usually the way that the curve builds on Amazon is it builds all the way to like the 22nd or 21st. Like that's your biggest day because it's just like a hill and you can see as a lot of the other ecom kind of comes off the table as a shipping option, Amazon just reaps all that demand because they've got the two day one day shipping. And by staying in the game, there's a lot of juice there, but I agree, Sean, like you don't need to pay him for express shipping as a brand, especially like early December. If you're going to do it, like you better deliver because it is not worth the headaches of the additional sales you're going to get if people aren't going to get their product on time. Yeah, and what we target is like a 95% success rate on packages like that we guarantee the two day on like, you know, 12, 20 or whatever, we should do a separate episode about just that last week of Christmas. I don't think we talking about that Black Friday summer Monday is great, but the 21st of December is like my fourth biggest day of the year or something like we should have a whole episode about post Black Friday summer Monday, optimizing December because there's so much money to be captured there. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. Are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar and offers prep sense. I am talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see with North Beam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable becomes so when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing this is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. Okay, guys, talking about a lot of stuff. Now we're talking about calendar and how to actually plan out this quarter. Here's Ridge for you guys. We just wrapped up the first week of September, our sweepstakes. Okay, we pulled that into July. So July was a dead period for us. There's obviously prime day, but there's nothing else going on. So we started our sweepstakes early August is all sweeps and then it ends the first week of September. The day before the Apple event goes live because then we're in tech, so now we're all tech focused in September. So those two months back to back massive months, then it comes to October and we sort of friends and family sale. So October, we do some product launches early in the month. Then we do a friends and family sale and then we have one last product launch the first week of November and then we go straight to offers and then we're on offer from 1115 to 1220 basically like we're hitting offers that whole time. So I think you can do product launches in Q4. I think you can do different sales in Q4 friends and families basically the same as prime day because there's a new prime day in October every single year. So I think you can do more promotions. It doesn't have to just be a spotlight on Black Friday, every Monday. I think you can do longer, bigger promotions and that optimizes the revenue curve, but I don't know how you guys think about calendars. I'm laughing because I'm trying to bench them and button myself and I'm just going to be Sean when I grow up. Pila is literally doing the same thing this year. It's like product launches in October, then we're on offer pretty much from like the November 12th to December 20th, whatever that time frame is. Yeah, I just think we focus too much on the revenue spike and not enough on the revenue curve. I think we can have very, very large revenue curves basically from the early October with product launches all the way to ship and cut off and that's why ridges 50% of our revenue is coming in Q4 this year Mike, what are your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's the same thing. I said earlier 17% of the revenue on gift buying is happening during those four days, but all those other days. matter. And like you said Sean, people love deals. The end. Like you need to find a way to be able to communicate deal as often as you can as a brand without damaging your brand. I think it's pretty much the strategy like beyond beyond sale as much as you possibly came without damaging the brand. That's your your job as the brand owner. And so when there are periods where it's just expected to be on deal, you better be on deal. Find every single one of those. What one other thing you can do to like smooth out your margin profile is that a lot of times you'll have variations of your your product like Sean has different colors of wallets. I have different colors of water bottles, you know, whatever. Killer certainly has this is that you can't you don't necessarily have to have everything in a product family on sale at the same time. And so this is one thing that we do is like we might have half our colors beyond sale as a part of the October prime day. But you know there's good number of people that come in and are like, yeah, I don't want any of the ones that are on sale. I'm happy to pay full price. And so our margin profile doesn't even take as much of a hit as you would think. So again, you find all these tactics for like how do I stay on deal as much as I can without taking the margin or the brand profile hit. And there's a lot of tactics out there. Yeah, look, and on that 17%. And if it's a 50 day shopping period, that means every day is 2%. And these four days are 17%. So they're basically 2X average. That's not that much. I mean, they're still, it's like, they're the biggest days by far, but there's still a lot of days to do a lot of revenue. Jason, you've told me in the past the way you plan your calendar is if car dealerships or furniture stores are on sale, hexcrod is going to be on sale. Is that the strategy you're taking this year? Really? I don't know. I don't know if I said that actually. You know, you guys make some actually really good points, but look what we typically do is, you know, we've got this going to be an October prime. And then we're going to start early. Like kind of when everyone else starts, like it's, it's like November 15th these days, there's something like that people have been starting early. And we see the pop like we see people are just like some people just grabbing it when the deal comes out. We do have a couple of really key product launches this year. We're not, we're not like precious about when when to launch products. It just so happens that we're launching something really big in October. And here's the beauty. We're probably going to sell it all before BFCM. And that's what I want to do. I was like fighting with my team to launch this thing as early as possible so that we don't have to sell any of it on sale because we just, we know how much the factory can make. And I'm pretty sure we're going to sell sell it all because it's one of our biggest launches that we've ever done. But what was interesting about what, you know, what I just heard is, you know, Mike's point about BFCM being only being 17% and then talking about like 70 days of holiday shopping. You know, I never really thought about pre BFCM before that time period. And I want to go back and think about that. I think that's actually really interesting because after BFCM, we roll into holiday, right? We have different deals. But we're like, we're running something until the shipping cutoff, just like, it's like you guys. But at that time, like between crime and November 15th or whatever it is, like that's interesting because people are shopping then, right? I agree with you. Do not launch a big product and then mark it down for Black Friday, seven Monday. We always do big product launches either in October or November. Those stay full price. There's no expectation to Mike's point that the whole website needs to be on sale the entire time. That's just not true. Like have a flagship offer. How could we drive the drives up to? But our luggage, it's new. It's going to be full price, right? And there's no expectation that it's on sale. So I'm with you on that one, Jason. If I had to start over and scale to nine figures today, Sarah's IQ would be non-negotiable. That's the only AI that I trust with accuracy. If you want to just hold data out of wherever and drop it in cloud, you are really gambling your business. I get reports every day and I know the data is certified. And that's just me. My entire team is so deep in the weeds in Sarah's. We have every single data source in our business linked into Sarah's. Therefore, we can go and grab whatever we want. That way, we have so many different avenues of accessing our data and you're just flying blind without this. Big brands already trusted. Growing brands now have access to the exact same foundation at under two grand a month. Live in a matter of days. Go to Sarahsatellitics.com and book your walkthrough today. You have to know what is success for your company, this BFCM. What is it? What is the North Star metric? What is the way in one sentence that you would describe what success is? And it's like, well, it's to sell a lot of stuff. Yeah, I get it. But like specifically, are you trying to acquire more new customers? Are you trying to maximize your contribution profit? Are you trying to do a particular thing with your supply chain? Are you trying to logistically? Are you trying to hit certain kind of efficiency in terms of getting people their orders or the time it takes to get their orders? You need to have a really specific goal for your team that helps them understand what success is. Because it can't be as amorphous as just like, hey, sell more. Like, so when we've been our strongest, I've given the team a really clear definition of what would be success in this period for us. And some years, it's been like as many bottles and hands as possible. And other years, it's been like, hey, this is our time to really maximize contribution profit so that we can hit the number that we want to hit for the year. But know what that is. Tell your team beforehand, have it on dashboards, be aware of it, be sending slacks where you're updating people on how it's going so that everybody knows whether or not you're succeeding at the goal of what you're trying to do so that everything you're offering structure, your shipping prices, everything else is structured around making sure that you're able to actually be successful in the metric that you've deemed the most important to your business, this BFCM. So Mike, when you're setting top 10 rules through your whole organization, are you breaking it out by team? Do you have different key objectives by department or leader? Or how are you actually drilling those down throughout the entire organization? Absolutely. We're starting at the organizational level and I'm asking what sets us up for success going forward organizationally. And then I am empowering each of my leaders. I'm like saying, hey, for each of you and your departments as they roll up to me, here's what I think this looks like. And then I'm giving them the autonomy and the judgment about how to push that down their teams. So it's a combination of being fairly heavy handed with like, this is what we have to accomplish, but then pretty flexible about the tactics and how they get there. So for example, I for sales, I might say like, hey, you have this contribution profit goal for the fourth quarter, but there's 10 different ways they can get there. And I know they know their channels better than I do. And I give them the flexibility to decide exactly how they want to get towards it. And I think that that's probably the blend that works the best in most businesses. You're never going to have as much context when you start to get to a scaled organization. You're never going to have as much context as somebody who's thinking about it every single day. But instead, you got to paint the sidelines as I like to say, you got to paint the sidelines on the field that you're playing in and say, hey, these are your constraints. You can have a lot of freedom of movement in between those, but you got to be between these lines. So those lines are basically the goal for the organization. Like I said, sometimes it really is. We want to maximize how many new customers are coming through the doors. But as you get bigger and bigger as a business, it becomes like everybody's been saying, hey, this is a time to make profit. I'll remind everybody, the reason why it's called Black Friday is because historically, if you were a retailer, you lost money until these days. This is when you went from the red to in the black, and you had to make your money during this period, or you lost money for the year. So you need to be able to understand what you're trying to accomplish for a lot of brands that needs to be actually making money. And it's a lot of these concepts we've talked about throughout the pod kind of come together. You can't be overspending. You can't be chasing that additional customer where the marginal CPA is $150 just because it feels good. And it makes the number tick up a little bit more. You can't be selling through something where you're down to two weeks of inventory with 25 shopping days left, this kind of stuff. So I try to be pretty prescriptive at a high level. And then I give a lot of freedom in terms of how it's applied at the ground level. Dude, I love it. Yeah, look, this is a maker to break a moment for so many brands. I mean, if you mess up discounts, if you mess up inventory, if you mess up pacing, if you mess up fulfillment, it ruins your whole year, right? I mean, really 50% of our sales and volume come in this like, you know, six to eight week period. It's do it for rich as a brand. So so much pressure on this, that's why it's such a hot topic. That's why this is the number one rated episode of all time. People are going to listen to it and share with other friends. And it's because of the stakes. Mike's giving us a good, a good framework to make sure you understand what you're playing for. One other thing I would really encourage every brand, you need to understand how critical is BFCM to my actual business. If you run a more gift-driven business, then like, you have to crush it. Like, there is no excuses. There's no way that a subpar BFCM works out okay for you. And like, for example, we're in sports licensing and it's like sports licensing, you do 50% of your sales in like 20 of the days in the year. So it's like, you just have to crush those days. There's other businesses like adult drinkware is kind of like this where it's nice to do well during BFCM, but it's not existential. And I think we've gotten ourselves into trouble some of the time when we viewed it as more important to that business than it actually was. So you need to have a really high level of awareness of like, what is best for your brand? And you know what? Like, probably stay off Twitter because you get on Twitter and everybody's posting screenshots, and it's really easy to compare yourself to a bunch of a non-accounts that are tweeting about brands that aren't even really related to yours and have totally different goals in yours. Know your business, be secure enough that you're able to prioritize BFCM in accordance with how important it is to what you're actually selling. Matt, we've talked everything Black Friday summer Monday. We've given so many tips for the brand operators out there. As the face, the lead architect of Wynx, our in-house brand, does any of this matter do you? Are you going to change anything? No, and this is kind of what I asked the guys in the webinar that we did. And Jason had good advice. Like, Wynx is so early in the journey that it's almost suicidal to try to spend $ad dollars for us at this time of year. We're not a gifting product. So it's like, why go into the CPM war when January is much more important to us. And Jason had great advice and I think it was bang on, which is we're probably going to lean more into creator and just impressions and getting surface area out there on social. So that one we do hit prime time for Wynx that we're ready. Well, I was just saying, like, I think this is a great time to lean into organic, right? Just because there's so many people that are engaged, you know? Yeah, yeah. I love that advice, Jason. I really, like, I think you're framing on it. Like, there's a lot of people online. They're going to consume on, they're not just going to shot, they're just going to consume more content. So like, how do we be there for that? That is top of mind. Yeah. And let's set ourselves up for New Year New Year, which is the beginning of the year. Everybody's thinking about, hey, what do I want to change about my diet? What do I want to change about my sleep? Or, you know, like, how do I want to lose a few pounds? How do I want to get in the gym? And that's a really perfect time if you run a consumable or a supplement company to be there and be ready. And this kind of just goes back to what I was saying earlier, like, for Wynx, like, BFCM is not that important, right? Like people are not thinking about buying supplements or buying something for their sleep necessarily during that period compared to any other time of year. And so there's no reason to be trying to go to head-to-head with Hexclad and Ridge, you know, in the ad auction. But I think we can set ourselves up for one of these periods where a lot of brands aren't doing much. You know, Sean, you've talked about it as like the Q5 period. I think the Q5 and the New Year New U period for us going to be huge with Wynx. All right, guys, that's the pod. You got to hit with 20, 30, 50 of the world's greatest tips. People would spend millions of dollars to get these. You get them for free because this is the operator's podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you to Jason, Mike, Matt, myself, the four original operators, and all of our wonderful sponsors. We appreciate it. Talk to you later. Goodbye.