Black Friday
Myself and Hilary Grant recently took a trip together and spent a lot of time discussing Black Friday...this is a refined version of our thoughts and conversation on that trip:
"This year a few of us small business owners have decided to opt out of the Black Friday promotion or have decided to scale back their discount offering.
We want to build sustainable businesses by growing a steady and loyal customer base by offering our products at the price they are worth to allow us to make a living.
As our products are made either by ourselves, or with a local manufacturer this means that we are unable to replenish stock in a very short space of time. By offering a Black Friday discount we encourage our customers to purchase from us on one single day out of the entire festive shopping season. If we run out of stock from offering a discount, we don't have enough time to replenish the stock or make more. That means we potentially miss out on sales by selling cheap and fast. Bigger high street or fast fashion stores can afford this because they buy cheap and in bulk. Their profit margins are often extremely high, possibly even over-inflated to allow for these 'sales' to make us think we're all getting a bargain from time to time. Most small companies don't do that, it's just not possible, so the price we display is the price it's worth to allow us to make a living. We all love a discount from time to time and will sometimes offer a small one to our loyal customers as a reward for this loyalty, but huge discounts right before Christmas cannot become the norm for small businesses like ours.
Whilst it is certainly business convention to discount stock based on supply and demand we don't want to punish the people who invest in our collections early and throughout the entire year. We love all of our customers and feel that it's unfair for people to miss out on a discount because of an arbitrary day that holds little relevance to UK culture."
We hope you understand and appreciate why we're opting out of Black Friday this year.
Many thanks,
Laura & Hilary
1 Response
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Philippa Baird
November 23, 2016
Good decision. The whole Black Friday spending frenzy is horrid. More importantly, you are so right to value yourselves and your work. Keep creating.