As we close the Black Friday – Cyber Monday shopping weekend out, I reflect on an experience I had early in my startup journey.
As we close the Black Friday – Cyber Monday shopping weekend out, I reflect on an experience I had early in my startup journey.
Earlier that year, in 2013, I had founded and launched The Lodge.
This was the early days of the Made in America movement and the heyday for the heritage menswear movement.
The Lodge was dedicated to the mission of shining a light on American makers, specifically craftsmen making Men’s Accessories.
At first, before we opened a store and started doing pop-ups, it was an Ecommerce-only business.
That Black Friday weekend, my playbook was to run a 25% off sale sitewide.
It was the first Christmas holiday season for the company and we hadn’t run any discount offers yet.
As I was writing the email series for the week (in the early days, I did most of the work, as founders do), I thought about ways to sweeten the offer.
How can I give more value? I wanted to show my appreciation for those early followers.
A contest? A special deal? A giveaway?
As I thought about it in our Brooklyn office, I looked over at the boxes that I had picked up earlier in the month.
When we launched, I had wanted to create the perfect “Man Shop” with the things I liked. In addition to all of these great accessories, I stocked the online shop with whiskey tumblers, flavored toothpicks, antique items, and vintage Playboy magazines (don’t cancel me, this was a different era)
I had uncovered a stock of hundreds of vintage mags in great condition.
Why not give them away? Guys seemed to like them, based on how many we were selling.
So I added an offer to the Thanksgiving email. A free Playboy magazine with every order. I mean, I’ve seen free items in other promo emails, why not give it a try?
I’m an entrepreneur. Whether working in startups or in the big company world, I’ve always liked building, testing, trying. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
In this case, I had just added a wrench in what had been a well-planned holiday playbook.
Well, naturally, the orders started rolling in on Thanksgiving, the first day of the offer. I also began reading some email replies, to the tune of “great offer, but my wife, girlfriend, etc won’t appreciate me getting a magazine”.
Since I hadn’t really thought this through, I didn’t consider any objections that customers might have.
Again, I’m an entrepreneur. Unperturbed, I edited the Black Friday email- now we were giving away either a free Playboy magazine or free Whiskey toothpicks.
This was the early days of Shopify (my ecom platform) and there wasn’t yet a way to edit the cart settings. So I just asked customers to put in their choice in the order notes- Playboy or Whiskey.
Simple enough. Right?
Problem was, about half of the hundreds of orders we received over the weekend didn’t put any notes in.
On Monday, when my in-house fulfillment guys started packing up the orders, they looked at the blank notes and asked me what to do.
So began the process of reaching out to every single order and confirming their choice of the freebie.
My gut action of adding this holiday freebie messed up the packing, shipping, and sending out of these orders. It screwed up the customer service, which needed to focus on product and order questions. Instead they had to do outreach.
In the end, we were behind several days on the fulfillment side. We were able to get over the hump and have a good holiday season.
I never forgot that lesson, even today. When building a playbook for business, consider the contingencies, plan them in. But don’t second-guess the playbook at the last minute.
This approach has helped me to better balance the creative side and the operational side of being in a product business.
I hope that all of you have a successful BFCM and a great holiday season.
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