Over 30 Black Friday Tips From Four 9-Figure Ecommerce Operators

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Operators Podcast. We have an amazing, action-packed, tip-filled Black Friday, Cyber Monday episode coming at you. We're gonna talk about upsell offers, bundles, AOVs, how to, how to pace your calendars. Really, I can't even unpack all these tips right now 'cause there's gonna be so many of 'em. They're gonna come fast, they're gonna come loose, they're gonna come ready for ya. We have the core 4, me, Jason, Mike, Matt. Matt, how are you doing today?

Dude, I'm, 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 Pela Case x Lomi. We, we want the Pela Case x Lomi Black Friday playbook, man. We gotta, we gotta 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 right. It's the year of crazy weather. I know we're going to talk about weather. Actually, there was the map. I'm in Florida right now and there was an insane thunderstorm and the, and the street out there is like totally flooded. So we're whatever. Glad I'm here.

We'll do. It might be storming outside, but 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's 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 3 years ago, maybe 2024. We had a hard Black Friday. We wanted to go out there with $76 wallets. We had to midway through mark them down to $69 to make the ads work. So have a, what I call like first tier promo, the promo you wanna 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, um, where, um, I don't know what the team decided to do. Like, I mean, I literally wasn't even involved. Like, we have a process and I don't know, they were like YOLOing, trying something new and it did not, it was not good. 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. And, 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 2 full sets of creative for Black Friday offers. So like 2 different campaign offers for 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 that it's all approved creative, 'cause that's a big thing. Like make sure it's all in there and it's approved 'cause, you know, shit gets slower to approve. I don't know if AI 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 and 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, it was 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, okay, well we gotta change the offer or whatever, trying to figure out that to work. I think that's a great idea with AI. It's super easy. Just, you know, you have static, static. are gonna perform really well. Just have a couple different variations in there. And we're talking about bonus tips right now. Here's another bonus tip. If your brand's been around for a while, go back to the creative from 2020, 2021, 2022. You probably have banger ad ideas in there. Just turn 'em back on. Just like maybe adjust 'em 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 the 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 2 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 gonna be aligned with what customers 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. Uh, 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 stuff hits 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 2 weeks from now. So like, you, 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 COVID 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 do 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 outta the gate and you're like, man, this is working way too well. We're gonna 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 gonna do 50% more because you're feeling good on Thursday night and you're all full of turkey. You've gotta actually know what your business can maintain, and then you gotta pace it.

I have a visual of that.

Some guy with a belly hammering buttons in Facebook.

Just, just, I want to make more money. I want to make more money. No, and we've, we've, we've had to do that, right? Like we've had hit products that actually just ended up being breakout successes and you want to lean into it, but we look at the weeks to cover and it's like, oh look, we're going to sell out anyway. It's like we have to actually turn all the ads for this 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. Will 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 rep is actually compensated based on how much you spend. Yes. But no, but like, forget about the Meta rep. 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'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 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 it. I remember being in the text chain with my team. and one guy saying spend, spend, spend, and 2 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 gonna overspend. It's not incremental. And don't, like, take the win. Don't get crazy.

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It should be your most efficient time of the year. November and December are our most efficient months in terms of MER. And it's like, don't, don't blow it. It's like, there's, you're seeing the sales come in. If you're typically running at a 2x, you're like, dude, we could spend more. Take the 3x, take the 4x 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 lag before the weekend. So like we had to, 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 Pela, which was very much like Black Friday, Cyber Monday heavy, and then a little slower after, more impulse purchasey, more repeat driven. And then Lomi, which was like heavy, heavy gift with long consideration window. For us, and I've seen this now in a bunch of brands, Our 1-day click ROAS during this time jumps like 40%, right? And then our 30-day 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 it got closer to Christmas because it was such a giftable product. Whereas Pela, we would spend into this much shorter conversion window. So we would hit the, you know, Thursday, whatever. We would just start ramping up spend and looking against our hourlies. 'Cause we were just trying to capture like people just impulse buying. So I would say you wanna really know consideration window, uh, and those 1-day and then lagging, you know, whether that's a 7-day, a 30-day, they're gonna go up 'cause time compresses at this time of year. Like people will make faster decisions.

Dude, Matt, I, I, it's, it's a great tip and it's gonna tag onto my secondary tip, which is the sales need to start earlier. So everyone's sitting around waiting for Friday and they're like, maybe 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. Our Wednesday is a multimillion dollar day. Thursday's even bigger. Friday's even bigger. Then it kind of tapers off Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday ends up 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 fireworks show, or you talk to brands, you're 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, no, 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 where we're missing a week worth of sales. Right, 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 gonna be tougher 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 this the 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. Uh, to your point, Sean, like 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 dialed in on those 4 days that you miss like 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 gonna have enough time to mature, get impressions and get that data on the ads and ad set. 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, you know, maybe over the weekend, but there's a ton of other people that are shopping sooner, right? In fact, there's a lot of brands that start really, really early, but, you know, clearly you just have to know that, right? Like we've seen it every year. Black Friday always crushes, but there's so much demand to capture before that. So it's like, it's like there's some consumers that that will like pay regular price when they want something and others are waiting for a deal. And there's 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. Um, 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, um, all of our reject products. So we used to have, um, cases that just would look a little weird 'cause they wouldn't print well and we would sell people the waste. Literally built a campaign around like, hey, do you wanna buy our waste? And we would run that as like staff picks and fun things 3 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 gonna be the hero offer.

That's gonna go to my 3rd tip and point about how to actually structure calendars. But don't worry, Matt, we're gonna, we're gonna hit that.

Do you got, who's got a I've got a banger stat for you guys. 17% of holiday shopping, holiday e-commerce shopping happens Thanksgiving to 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, you need to use this to like also set up being really excellent in the days around it, because that's gonna be the majority of your sales if you're anything like the, the national average.

Are Last day shipping cutoff 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.

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That's a great stat, Mike. Jason, you had another tip for us.

If you're running an e-com 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 creative 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 how I've done it every year. This is how we do Black Friday.

Dude, and those are great 5 tips. If you need those tips, go ahead and follow Jason on social. He's going to tweet out those 5 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 You know, like they were designed for them. Look for ways to incorporate it in your business. For us, that's been embroidery and engraving, which has been a huge boon. We just bought, uh, I think 4 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. Like I could just sew these things. Yeah, dude.

I, I, I mean, I was glad I wasn't doing it by hand anymore. Right. So I'm like, guys, we gotta get a machine here. I'm fast, but come on. But yeah, like seriously look for it, guys. There's, 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, you know, 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 that's just wanting to drop ship stuff, that's trying to do minimum viable. that'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, I totally agree. We, we bought that watch factory, we were making wallets there, tariffs hit. It's basically pivoted to a full engraving and UV printing shop at this point. We're doing thousands of orders. Corporate gifting's a big part of that. But yeah, I, 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, 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 Whatnot. And I'm like, hey man, 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 'em and then they're marking it up, you know, 6x. That's actually the, the people that are making really good money. So like I'm seeing this across a bunch of different industries, the, 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'll go to Matt. Matt had something hot and fresh for us.

Dude, you know what I just realized? The thing I freaking tell my team every year, it's whatever the number of emails and SMS that you sent, you're gonna send, you should send more. Like we're not sending enough. This is like the one time of year you have permission to be annoying as a brand. And too many people think they're like, Don, I can't send 4 emails in a day. It's like, yes you can.

Right?

You can send more. This is one time a year. You have full permission from everyone to send more email.

Yeah, let's, let's double-click on what Matt just said. He said 4 times a day. If you're not thinking about multiple emails a day, you're behind the curve. Matt's gonna be— Matt's gonna hit people up about every 15 minutes for 36 hours.

Next to you.

Please buy, please buy, please buy. So yeah, that's, that's the pace we're talking about here, guys. Um, okay, we covered some great tips. Who's got another one for us before we talk about calendars?

The best Black 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 just come up with bigger and bigger bundles. And it's like, it's shocking how many people buy them, you know, like buy these massive bundles. So I would just say like, when you're looking at offer, make sure you're thinking about increasing AOV.

It's a great tip. I think Matt had another one for us.

Yeah. Uh, this is not an offer or how to sell more shit.

tip.

This is a team tip. You have to, you, 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, like we just choose this as a time to like have so much fun. It's hilarious to watch these numbers, you know, like Jason, when those numbers start to rip for you guys, that's a great feeling. So like we would put TVs up in the office, we would have like real-time hourly trackers, people could see it. Not only that, but like you, you adjust much quicker when it's like in front of everyone. But the celebration side of this is actually just a riot.

Dude, I think it's, I think that's a great tip. Take $10,000, buy gift cards in $100 increments and throw those things out like you're throwing candy at a parade.

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This is when it's time to take your team to Chili's. Get an Old Timer burger, add cheese, splurge, guys. Like, if you want to get the, 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 onto the next one, onto the next one. And also like if you go really big during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, there's gonna 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 3PLs out there. We talk a lot of shit about 3PLs, we beat 'em up, but I don't do my own fulfillment. I don't think any of us are doing our large-scale fulfillment anymore. 3PLs are the backbone of Black Friday. If you're, if you're doing 10,000 order days or whatever, it's like someone's gotta actually put that shit in boxes. So shout out 3PLs, make sure you send them some gift 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 own 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, why is it not spending what I think it should spend? Why are we not hitting this number?

Yeah.

Celebrating 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 gonna get prioritized? Guess who's gonna get the best level of service? Like this is just how people work.

Dude, it's— these are all great tips. Also, don't be scared to be the most annoying client.

Uh, you may—

me and Micron polar end of the, the spectrum there.

It's a, it's a real good cop, bad cop thing. I try and follow Sean around and use the exact same vendors so I can be their favorite and then Sean can be their least favorite.

Um, okay. I got, I got a, I got a great tip for everybody. This is true alpha. If you've made it 20 minutes into the pod and you're waiting for that real alpha, it's like, hey, this is all fluff. Where's the real alpha? Here it is, guys. Do more gifts 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. It's a beautiful gift bag and it solves a problem for them. There are people are buying RidgeWalls to give as gifts. Now we have an awesome bag for it. They could put a little name tag on it or whatever. The perceived value is really, really high. It acts as a promo. It acts as another reason to purchase. And Ridge was built on what we call no-brainer offers. It's like an offer so good you wouldn't want to buy from anywhere else. Gift with 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 as a time to become your vendor's favorite customer. There is so much alpha in being likable, 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 to them and good to them 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 3PL, These people that are making your business possible, like, hey, send one to 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 to as 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 at people and works every year.

Dude, Matt, that is a great practical hack. I'm not even gonna call that a tip. I'm gonna call that a hack, dude. I love that.

People want sauce. There it is.

Okay.

I love seeing it 'cause that actually lines up with my next tip, and this is more Gen Z focused, 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 gonna happen. Like you need to have people going live Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You need to book off 2 to 4 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 gonna be watching football, people are gonna be at whatever and scrolling. You're gonna wanna 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% every single month this year. Embrace TikTok Shop, embrace live, plan those right now.

Live is the future. The decision makers have spoken. TikTok is saying we are prioritizing this. Whatnot is hitting these crazy valuations. The future is going to be live. The quicker your team makes the transition, the quicker you start. I don't even think like, your idea is great, Matt, but like, I would take it a step further. It's like you should have people doing 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 laggard 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 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's looking for something interesting to look at. Have your brand be one of the people that shows up and gives them something interesting to engage with.

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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 just the way our product assortment works, 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, I want to have a simple, easy to understand, great value offer that you hit from Sunday to Tuesday. Like I, 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 a 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, imagine seeing a post for an offer and then you're like, yeah, you can't get that anymore. That was, that was the second day of Christmas offer. Just frustrating. It's a bad experience. Matt, Mike, what do you guys think?

We used to do that 12 Days of Christmas. It's like I, every year I'm like, this is a fricking art project. This is not marketing. Like you're doing this for yourselves. Nobody gives a shit about us for 12 fricking days. Hell yes, Sean.

I've got a derivative of this, which is BFCM is the time to sell a ton of your best stuff. And the problem that we've done in the past, don't, 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 wanna get out of? That's, this is 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 and your offers around your best things. It's so simple and so straightforward, but also like, it's so easy to think, well, I've gotta 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. They're the time to absolutely blow it out on your very best stuff.

If you have a long tail of, TJ Maxx is your friend. Go ahead and call them up. They'll take whatever you want and they'll pay you basically like 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 wanna make a ton of money, You wanna 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 'em a good offer and just drive that home. I love that tip, Jason. I love your tip. Thinking about things different way. Matt, you brought us 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, I will say like we've, 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 crossed $1 million in year-to-date upsell revenue via AfterSell by Rockd. They're a sponsor of 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 at checkout. 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 mean, it may sound dumb. Uh, charge more for express shipping at this time of year. Like you can pick up an extra couple bucks, guys. Uh, like people are, are like, you know, they really want your thing and you're charging, let's say $12 for express shipping. Like make it $14. They're, it's not gonna matter.

We, we should have a whole episode on, on shipping profiles going into the holidays.

Oh God, we could 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 2-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 wanna get the angriest 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 gonna draw people in. Um, on Amazon, the numbers, usually the way that the curve builds on Amazon is it builds all the way to like the 20th, 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 e-com kind of comes off the table as a shipping option, Amazon just reaps all that demand because they've got the 2-day, 1-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 be paying for express shipping as a brand, especially like early December. But if you're going to do it late, you better deliver because it is not worth the headaches. Of the additional sales you're gonna get if people aren't gonna get their product on time.

Yeah.

And what we target is like a 95% success rate on packages like that. We guarantee the 2-day on like, you know, a 12/20 or whatever. We should do a separate episode about just that last week of Christmas. I don't think we talk enough about that. Black Friday, Cyber Monday is great, but the 21st of December is like my 4th biggest day of the year or something. Like we should have a whole episode about Post-Black Friday, Cyber Monday, optimizing December, cuz there's so much money to be captured there.

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Okay guys, talking about a lot of stuff. Now we're gonna talk 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 Techtember. So now we're all tech-focused in September. So those 2 months back-to-back, massive months. Then it comes to October and we start a 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 11/15 to 12/20, basically. Like we're, we are 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 family's basically the same as Prime Day, 'cause 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, Cyber Monday. I think you can do longer, bigger promotions and that optimizes the revenue curve. But I wanna know how you guys think about calendars.

I'm laughing because I'm trying to Benjamin Button myself and I'm just gonna be Sean when I grow up. Uh, Pela is literally doing the same thing this year. It's like product launches in October, then we're on offer pretty much from, I think, November 12th through December 20th, whatever that timeframe 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 the shipping cutoff. And that's why Ridge's 50% of our revenue is coming in in Q4 this year. Mike, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing I said earlier. 17% of the revenue on gift buying is happening during those 4 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 is pretty much the strategy. Like be on sale as much as you possibly can with without damage— 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. One, 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. Pela 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 be on sale as a part of the October Prime Day. But, you know, there's, there's a 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%, If it's a 50-day shopping period, that means every day is 2%, and these 4 days are 17%, so they're basically 2x average. That's not that much. You know what I mean? There's still, it's like, look, 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, HexCloud's gonna 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, there's going to be an October Prime and then we're going to start early. Like kind of when everyone else starts, like it's, what is it like November 15th these days or something like that. People have been starting early and we see the pop. Like we see people are just like, some people are just grabbing it when the deal comes out. Um, we do have a couple of really key product launches this year. Um, we, we're not, we're not like precious about when, when to launch products. It just so happens that, um, 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, I've been 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 it all because it's one of our biggest launches that we've ever done. But what was interesting about what I just heard is Mike's point about BFCM only being 17% and then talking about like 70 days of holiday shopping. I'd 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? And we have different deals. Um, but we're, we're like, we're running something until the shipping cutoff, just like, just like you guys. Um, but that time, like between, um, Prime 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, Cyber 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, have people you drive, you drive stuff 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.

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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 kinds 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 really clear definition of what would be success. success in this period for us. And some years it's been like as many bottles in 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, your offer structure, your shipping prices, everything else is structured around making sure that you're able to actually be successful on the metric that you've deemed the most important to your business, this BFCM.

So Mike, when you're setting top-down goals for 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've, I, for sales, I might say like, hey, you have this contribution profit goal for the 4th quarter, but there's 10 different ways they can get there. And I, 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 gonna have as much context as somebody who's thinking about it every single day. But instead, you gotta paint the sidelines, as I like to say, you gotta 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 gotta be between these lines. So those lines are basically the goal for the organization. Like I said, sometimes it really is, we wanna 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, 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, 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 2 weeks of inventory with 25 shopping days left, this kind of stuff. So I try to, 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 make or break 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, 6 to 8 week period. It's do or die for Ridge as a brand. So, so much pressure on this. That's why it's such a hot topic. It's why this is the number one rated episode of all time. People are gonna listen to it and share with all their friends. And it's because of the stakes. Mike's given 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 VSCM, 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 anon accounts that are, you know, tweeting about brands that aren't even really related to yours and have totally different goals than yours. Know your business, be secure enough that you're able to prioritize BFCM in accordance with like how important it is to what you're actually selling.

Matt, we've talked everything Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We've given so many tips for the brand operators out there. As the face, the lead architect of Winks, our in-house brand, Does any of this matter to you? Are you gonna 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, Pela Case x Lomi is so early in the journey that it's almost suicidal to try to spend ad dollars for us at this time of year. Uh, we're not a gifting product, so it's like, why, 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 gonna lean more into creator and just impressions and getting surface area out there on social so that when we do hit prime time for Pela Case x Lomi, 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, I, I think your framing on it, like there's a lot of people online, they're going to consume all, they're not just going to shop. They're just going to consume more content. It's like, how do we be there for that? That is top of mind.

Yeah. And let's set ourselves up for new year, new you, 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 Pela Case x Lomi, 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 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 You period for us is going to be huge with Pela Case x Lomi.

All right, guys, that's the pod. You got 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 Operators Podcast. Thank you for being here. here. Thank you to Jason, Mike, Matt, myself, the 4 original operators, and all of our wonderful sponsors. Thank you for being here. We appreciate it. Talk to you later.

Goodbye.