Black Friday 2026: What Operators at Ridge, Hexclad, Portland Leather and Other Brands Are Doing Differently This Year

This summer and early fall, six sessions of the Operators community's Black Friday webinar series put founders, growth leads, and operators from Ridge, Hexclad, Portland Leather Goods, Simple Modern, Grüns, Hulken, Tao Clean, VSOX, and several other brands on the same stage, alongside a peak-season data presentation from Contentsquare. We went through the transcripts and pulled out what repeats, what contradicts, and what a store owner can actually act on before November.

A note on the numbers: they're what each speaker or presenter said on the sessions, and most are self-reported by the brands. Where a figure comes from Contentsquare's analysis of more than 2,000 retail websites, we say so. Treat everything here as a benchmark to test against your own data, not a promise about your results.

The Best Predictor of Black Friday Is Decided Before September Ends

Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Collective made the most uncomfortable argument of the series: the size of your active customer file on Black Friday predicts the result better than any offer or email calendar. He defined it as everyone who bought in the last six months, not your total email list. Brands that grew that file by more than 10% had a 77% chance of growing Black Friday Cyber Monday, with a median gain of 40%. Brands with a flat file had a 50% chance and a median gain of 5%. Brands whose file shrank by 10% had a 30% chance, and the median result was a 20% decline.

He also offered a forecasting rule of thumb: across the brands he looked at, Black Friday orders landed between 4% and 9% of the active customer file, with a median of 6.6%. Several other speakers echoed the same idea from different angles. Shireen, who has scaled more than 100 brands, said most Black Friday volume comes from existing customers who were themselves acquired during earlier sale moments, so September and October are the last good window to acquire new ones. The practical takeaway is to pull your active customer count today, compare it to last year, and build a win-back flow if you don't have one.

Every number in this piece ties back to one of those four areas. Worth bookmarking before you read the rest.

The Peak Window Is Getting Shorter

Contentsquare's peak-season analysis, covering more than 200 million sessions across over 2,000 sites, found that high-traffic days before Black Friday shrank from about 21 days in 2024 to about 16 days in 2025. Transactions started rising later too, around 19 days out versus 24. Conversion rate peaked two days before Black Friday last year, up from one day before the year before, which suggests shoppers arrive later but are ready to buy when they do. There was also no second wave after Cyber Monday: traffic dipped and stayed down.

That's a hard argument for waiting. If research happens in a two-week window and buying happens fast, your site has less time to recover from a slow product page or a clumsy checkout. Contentsquare's own advice was to stress-test the highest-traffic pages from last year now, run A/B tests while the stakes are low, and have a plan for what you pivot to on December 1. Portland Leather's McCoy took the opposite view of the calendar, treating Q4 as a 55-day season from November 1 to Christmas, but the underlying message is the same: have something planned for every week, not just one weekend.

Peak Is a Conversion Game, Not a Basket-Size Game

Contentsquare's numbers are worth keeping next to your own analytics. Average order value fell during peak compared with each retailer's baseline, by 16.8% on desktop and 11% on mobile. Conversion rate more than made up for it: desktop conversion at peak averaged 4.53%, a 64% increase over baseline, and mobile conversion nearly doubled, to 2.41%. Mobile carried 78.7% of peak traffic, but desktop converted at close to twice the mobile rate. The payment step showed the highest drop-off in the checkout flow.

Their examples were small and concrete. Love Honey, a retailer of sexual wellness products, saw high exit rates on category pages a few days into its campaign, noticed that shoppers who used filters converted well, and pulled its best-performing filters out onto the page. Conversions rose 30%, and the whole change took minutes. Tommy Hilfiger added a quick-view add-to-cart button on list pages. Etsy lets shoppers save favorites without creating an account and carries them across devices. None of that is clever. It's the unglamorous checkout and navigation work that decides whether a rare, short spike in intent turns into orders.

If your store's mobile speed or payment step is weak, that's worth a focused look from our BFCM revenue readiness sprint.

A deeper, ongoing issue is better suited to our conversion rate optimization audit.

Offers: Stack Them, Don't Just Deepen Them

Sean Frank walked through ten offer types: straight percentage off, gift with purchase, prepackaged bundles, buy more save more, limited editions, time-gated gift cards, early access and VIP tiers, sweepstakes, charity or financing offers, and mystery boxes. Ridge's team said they stack six to eight of them across a holiday sale, where ten years ago they ran 20% off sitewide and, after a soft year, went to 30%. Shireen listed offer stagnation as one of four Q4 traps, and warned that running the same discount every year, or just making it deeper, trains customers to wait. Both made the same point about margin: a bigger percentage cuts into profit without necessarily fixing the conversion problem.

A few specifics worth borrowing. Ridge sets target dollar prices first and works out the percentage afterward, which is why its discounts look odd: the team's example was taking a $95 wallet to $76 and a $150 wallet to $99. Sean argued that for products under $200, shoppers think in price buckets, so a $99 price will beat a $109 price even if the percentage looks tidier. Tao Clean said a tiered buy-one, buy-two, buy-three structure more than doubled its average order value. Shireen's advice for the weekend itself was to avoid a deeper discount and introduce a differentiated offer instead, such as a gift with purchase, so customers who already bought at the earlier price don't write to support asking for an adjustment. And a Hexclad marketer reminded the group that if you run ads for the full period, make the offer visible on the site itself so every traffic source, including direct and affiliate, lands on the same clear message.

If your platform makes bundles, tiered pricing, or gift-with-purchase rules awkward to configure, that's a development task to scope in September, not November. Our Shopify team builds exactly this kind of promotion logic.

So does our Magento team.

Start Earlier, but Don't Run a Month-Long Sale

McCoy's calendar for Portland Leather Goods staggers offers by customer type: early access for app users and loyalty members in the first week of November, buy-one-get-one for returning customers in week two, an overstock clearance collection in week three, sitewide Black Friday, a new bag or two launched Thanksgiving night, Black Friday morning and Cyber Monday morning, twelve days of new products in early December, a shipping-deadline push, and an omnichannel push to Amazon and stores once site shipping closes. He described returning customers as the hidden key to a profitable Q4, because you already paid to acquire them and can reach them through email and SMS at low cost.

Shireen made the counter-point: a sale that lasts all month dilutes the brand, creates a comparison problem the following year, and can pull demand out of January, so spread out offers and gifts instead of running one discount for weeks. Sean said Ridge opens its sale to the email list well before Thanksgiving to capture early shoppers, but ramps ad spend only around the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when buying behavior kicks in. Hexclad's team added that long consideration cycles let them keep the sale itself shorter. Which approach fits depends on your price point and how long people usually take to decide.

Pacing Spend and Reading Attribution Honestly

Several brands shared planning tools. London from Hexclad showed a daily and hourly spreadsheet that tracks planned versus actual ad spend and revenue across Shopify, Amazon, and other channels, with year-over-year comparisons by weekday, and pointed out that Amazon backdates returns, so you should backfill at least 30 days of data rather than trusting yesterday's number. A Hexclad marketer on the panel described splitting the annual budget roughly evenly between the first ten months and the last two, running a lower efficiency target in the months before November on purpose, and asking customers in post-purchase surveys how long they have known the brand.

The attribution warnings were consistent. Olivia from House said experiments run before Black Friday drive more than twice the value after the test window ends, which means October spend can look poor and still pay off in November. A Hexclad marketer explained that Meta reports conversions on the day they happen, so people prospected earlier in the week appear as same-day results, making CAC look better than it is on Black Friday itself. One panelist said a split-country test last year showed a 100% scale-up was less efficient than a 50% scale-up in the week of Black Friday, and that the team plans to spend less aggressively this year. For your own store, this is a good argument to get your analytics and attribution in order before the season, not during it.

Content, Channels, and Creative

Hulken's cofounder Alex reported that graphics with big percentage-off tags in organic feeds earned a few thousand views last year, while reels with people, product use, and storytelling earned hundreds of thousands, so the company will keep its content strategy steady and let stories, email, and SMS carry the sale message. She also said the company's opening SMS offer for VIP buyers, deliberately more generous than the public deal, drove over 30% of its entire BFCM revenue. Panelists suggested running winning evergreen ads with updated sale messaging rather than rebuilding from scratch, and keeping the website pop-up on to capture emails by reinforcing the current offer instead of adding another discount.

On the paid side, Tao Clean said it moved from 50 to 75 creative concepts per month to 250 to 300 videos a month in the lead-up to Q4, while VSOX tested running the same ad from a differently named Facebook page, such as a Black Friday deals page, to change how shoppers read the context. For email and SMS, one panelist said the team sends four to five emails on Black Friday and reviews revenue per send afterward, while the panel estimated 10 to 16 messages across email and SMS over the four-day weekend. You can see the supporting setup work in our email and SMS automation service.

Operations, Margin, and What Breaks If You Win

EJ from Dad Gang opened with the question that kept coming back: what breaks if we win? His arithmetic was simple. Adding 20 seconds to each order across 30,000 extra orders is roughly 166 extra labor hours. He urged brands to bring operations and finance into promotion planning early, and not to replace an ERP, 3PL, or warehouse, rebuild a site, or install a pile of new apps in November. Tao Clean, which expects to ship more than 25,000 orders on its busiest day, said it's growing customer service from eight to 30 people after last year's strain. A leadership panel with Hexclad's Jason and Simple Modern's Mike added that leaders should define success in advance, whether that's contribution dollars, share growth, or a margin floor, and recognize that the people running channels are often rewarded for scale, not profit.

Jamal's three-step version for smaller brands: calculate true landed cost per unit, reserve about 15% of the BFCM budget to test offers in October such as BOGO 50% off, gift with purchase, and a 25% discount plus a gift, comparing revenue per order, profit per order, margin, and break-even ROAS, then scale the winners at the start of November. Mike added a modeling result worth repeating: in a returning-customer business he saw about one cannibalized purchase for every two incremental ones during a promotion, which is useful when deciding how deep to discount. His other advice, shared by the panel, was that selling out is better than ending the season with excess inventory.

Subscriptions and the Weeks After Cyber Monday

Brands with recurring revenue raised a quieter set of concerns. Grüns found that a steep first-order incentive on its quarterly plan produced many new subscribers but a low-lifetime-value cohort, because renewal prices felt like sticker shock. It's been testing gifts with purchase since June and July to narrow that gap. Prudence from Beauty by Earth said that on Amazon, keeping subscribe-and-save coupons running during tentpole events produced a 97% lift in new subscribers versus non-tentpole events, that those subscribers stuck around about twice as well, and that a roughly $3 coupon bought around $21 of contribution margin on their products. Alina from Bobbie urged brands to give existing subscribers visible attention and to use the weeks after Cyber Monday to reinforce why a customer bought, not to stretch gifting messages that don't fit the product.

Several speakers also pointed beyond Cyber Monday. Shireen warned that evergreen creative hit with high frequency in Q4 will be fatigued by January, so plan the January creative now. Contentsquare's examples showed ASOS resetting its homepage to a welcome campaign a week after Black Friday, and Sephora pivoting to loyalty and member events.

A Pre-Season Checklist for Store Owners

• Pull your active customer file (purchased in the last six months) and compare it with this time last year; if it's smaller, plan win-back and acquisition now
• Set a code freeze date and don't ship major platform, ERP, 3PL, or app changes after it
• Test two or three offer types in October, measuring profit per order and break-even ROAS, not just revenue
• Plan offers around price points and landed cost, and keep a differentiated offer in reserve for the weekend itself
• Audit your top 10 pages from last year, mobile speed, and the payment step of checkout, then recheck them after any change
• Build a daily, and for peak days hourly, spend and revenue pacer, and decide in advance how you'll read attribution
• Plan what happens December 1 and in January: creative, loyalty, subscription messaging, and a post-peak homepage

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