BFCM 2023 Highlights

Did your Black Friday look like this?

‍Consumers seem to be back at it and are spendinggg this holiday season, but will it last?
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👏 Macro: 2023 vs 2022 Black Friday

• Total worldwide sales from Shopify merchants were $4.1B (up by 22%)
• Peak sales per minute on Shopify hit $4.2M (up by 20%)
• The average order value on Shopify was $110.71 (up by 5.6% or $7)
• Amazon shoppers spent $9.8 billion in the US (up by 7.5%)

🦾 Here’s what we saw across our client roster last Friday

As of writing this, we are still going strong, working hard to stretch out the success we saw from Black Friday, but… 

• ~85% of our clients beat last year
• ~30% of our clients doubled their stats from 2022
• ~15% of our clients had single-day sales of over $300K

We were happy to see many months of prep pay off. 🎉🚀

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👇 Here’s our best guess on what happened…

• Creativity, preparation, shared knowledge, and aligned incentives paid dividends.
• We collected and segmented a lot of email data leading up to BFCM as part of our buying strategies, in prep for dropping big offers to new potential customers.
• The build-up was a bit slower than usual, with consumers holding off longer to purchase.
• October 2023 year-over-year was ~10% lower on average than 2022, measured across aggregate client revenue metrics.
• More people took advantage of Black Friday to grab their Christmas gifts or daily necessities than in the past.
• Clients that prioritized and leaned into the promotional period for new customer acquisition or blowing out inventory over profit came out with huge topline numbers and new customers (scale).
• Clients that didn't see as much topline growth still increased revenue, choosing to pocket more profit (efficiency).

Bottom line: Purchase intent has potentially stabilized, or consumers were looking to find savings with recession woes growing.

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📈 Our clients (for the most part) beat their targets across all product categories, services, and stages of business

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Shoes & Apparel 

Meta & Retention [Full Service]
Google & Bing Search [Pilot Program]
TikTok [Launchpad]
Headless/CRO
Studios / Branding

• Recorded their biggest revenue day ever in 20 years in business
• Generated $359K (124% increase) in Black Friday sales YoY
• Saw a 60% YoY growth in new customer revenue through all of November

High-End Cookware:

Meta, Retention [Full Service]
Google Search, Studios [Pilot Program]

Headless / CRO 

• 230% increase in net sales for November YoY and still rising 
• On track to 4x what they did last BFCM
• Nearly doubled their $100K target for Black Friday

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Designer Pet Goods:
Meta [Launchpad → Pilot Program]
Google Search [Launchpad]

Studios / Branding 

• Total sales up by 90% on Black Friday
• November revenue up by 97% YoY
• November margin increased by 33% YoY

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Sporting Equipment:

Amazon [Full Service]

Studios / Branding

• Over $220K in topline revenue at a 6.5 total ROAS
• More than doubled the $113K we did last year on Black Friday, which was already 3x what we did the year prior
• Up by 20% YoY in comparison to last November as a whole

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Canadian Jewelry Company:

Meta [Full Service]

Retention [Pilot Program]
Google Search  [Launchpad]

Studios / Branding

• 32% increase in net sales margin YoY
• $149K to $196K topline revenue YoY
• TLDR: 24% more scale with added margin