We Started Black Friday in October - Here's What Happened to Our Sales

Evan Lee > [VISUAL: Evan Lee on screen. Text overlay: "Evan Lee, Head of Partnerships, Motion"]

Next person that I'd absolutely love to welcome to the stage is Joanna Wallace. She is one of the brightest thinkers in creative strategy and someone I've always quite admired. And she's currently the VP of Creative Strategy at the men's apparel brand, birddogs. So everybody, let's welcome Jo to the stage here.

Joanna Wallace Hello. Um, if Evan, God, I want to hire Evan to be my hype person like every Monday morning. I want Evan to just be like, you got this, Jo.

Evan Lee I got you. I got you. We can set it up a couple times. I'll join a couple meetings and everyone knows the vibe and they're good to go.

Joanna Wallace > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Joanna Wallace" with subtitle "CREATIVE STRATEGY & TEAM-BUILDING LEADER", a photo of her, and the birddogs logo]

Perfect. Um, I am Joanna and, uh, what you can know about me is the following. Um, so I'm currently the VP of Paid Media Creative at birddogs. Um, you can trust me, uh, because I was previously the Director of Paid Media at HexClad, where I built and scaled the internal team from scratch, processes, systems, team, everything. Um, I spent nearly a decade in paid media advertising. I did my time in agencies, consulting, uh, leading paid media teams with up to 3.5 million spend a month. Um, I've worked with brands like True Classic and Waterboy and Dr. Squatch. Um, I host a show called Fix It In Post on YouTube with Recharm, which is my other emotional support, uh, D2C platform. And, um, it's about real-world challenges and, you know, stuff in the industry and giving advice very much like this, um, with some wit and sarcasm. Um, but basically the big, the big thing I really care about in this industry is, um, how to get the best out of creative teams while not destroying their will to live. I think that being a creative is incredibly hard, being a strategist is incredibly hard, and it's important to, uh, know how to lead creatives and, and get them, get their best work out of them without them burning out.

So, I want to walk through today, um, a lesson, a case study that we had from birddogs this Q4. Um, it's about how starting gifting messaging earlier in the season, um, changed and expanded who actually was buying on Black Friday. And it revealed a lot to us about how we want to think about tentpole events for 2026.

Okay. Come on, buddy. Hey, we did it. Okay, great. So, let's talk about the common mistake that I've seen people make with tentpole events. So, yes, we are all trying to fill up the funnel all year, but when it comes to like big sales, people really start like wait until the sale to tell the story. We assume that urgency and a discount is going to do all the work for us. And that's a mistake because by the time you get to a tentpole event like a Black Friday, buyers have often already decided what they're going to buy, or at least a large percentage of personas, early planners, have decided. They are just waiting for permission and like the moment to strike. So if you are starting your messaging when the sale starts, you're late. Um, and you're asking urgency to create demand instead of just releasing it. Um, so this is the trap that this case study helped us avoid.

Okay. So the problem we were trying to solve and the question we were trying to answer is how do you bring in a new buyer during peak season, the most competitive time of year, without relying on discounts? So, for some context, birddogs has historically skewed male, which makes sense because it's a men's clothing brand. But holiday is a gifting moment. And in gifting moments, the buyer and the consumer, in this case the wearer, are not often the same person. So in particular, Q4 is when women's purchasing power like blows up. About 62% of Black Friday shoppers in the US are women, and they are typically the ones buying the volume of gifts, the gifts for everyone on the list. Men, listen, it may sound sexist, I'm following the data, usually probably have like one or two gifts that they're doing, their girlfriend, their wife, whatever. The woman of the household is generally doing the bulk of the shopping. So, if we wanted real growth, we had to figure out how do you speak to that buyer earlier than everyone else during the most competitive moment of the year, and get them when you hadn't traditionally been even trying to, you know, putting a lot of focus into getting the female buyer.

So, I started at birddogs the last week of September, and the first thing my team and I did was gifting messaging. Like no foundational administrative stuff, our spreadsheets were a mess, it did not matter. Boom, gifting. That is the priority, that's where the money is. We can have a messy spreadsheet. So that was intentional, and that's because it is the last window that we had with reasonable CPMs, and we needed to use that time to learn as much as possible before Black Friday. So if women are the biggest gifting audience, they are the priority to go after. So everything we did in October and early November was about teaching, not selling. So for those of you who watch my Recharm show, I broke this down in like intense detail when I was doing my Q4 prep episode, but now that I have the case study to prove my theories, um, I can, you know, relay this to you now with actual facts. Um, so anyway, people don't wake up on Black Friday and suddenly decide that they need to buy gifts. They, there is an early planner persona that is massive. Nearly 45% of shoppers start looking before November. So these are motivated buyers. These are people in research mode, and they are primed to learn about your product. Like everyone's mom is like this. We all know this person. There's a lot of them. Um, so we launched gifting and female-led messaging really early. There was no urgency, there was no deal. It was all about like reassurance, confidence, and the clarity around why Black Friday is a good gift. I'm sorry, why birddogs is a good gift for Black Friday. Um, and these ads didn't look like the rest of the ads that we'd run throughout the year because they were not going to men 25 to 34, our traditional bread and butter. They were tailor-made using best practices to convert women. Particularly older women, because they have all the money and are the biggest purchasers at the moment in this time of year. So, doing this early gave us time for two really important things. The first is that it gave the algorithm time to learn a new buyer. So platforms don't pivot overnight. They need a few weeks to catch up to the humans. Um, and second of all, it gave us time to iterate creatively. So, you know, when you're looking for that amazing, perfect mega ad, it's not usually that first stab. It's usually like round two or three after you've done some iterations and you've gotten data and you've been able to cobble together based on your metrics the perfect ad. And that's what happened to us. We were able to do two to three rounds of, of iterations, and we found this mega ad and it just, well, we'll get to how it performed. But, um, but yes, that was the, that is the plan. And to be clear, none of this is like a brand new concept. Um, I've seen this framework work before. Uh, I used it at HexClad as well. The difference is how it translated in birddogs in a different category, a different customer, and a gifting moment where the buyer and the wearer are not the same person.

Um, come on, buddy. Here we go. Um, here we are. Okay, so, uh, we got some early signals. We could see demand forming before Black Friday. So that was by looking at these soft metrics. They were guiding us. So female click-through rate was up 77% year over year. Hook rates were stronger. They were outperforming men. Um, engagement was improving, and this is all without any urgency. So this told us that while people aren't buying yet, they are learning and remembering us. We're getting into carts. Um, and that's exactly what we wanted at that stage. No one's going to buy in October. You have to let that go. It's okay. October is not a conversion month. It is a learning month. Um, and you need October to give you the signals to crush it in November.

Okay. So, what happened during Black Friday? So one really important clarification here is that we didn't run a traditional sale. There was no percentage off, there was no sitewide discount. Um, we were offering a gift-aligned deal, which was buy two items, get two free gifts. So what happened with performance? We had a huge increase in new customer purchases, particularly female customers. And our post-purchase surveys confirmed this. Most buyers were female new customers who had just found out about the brand within the past few weeks, specifically because of an ad. So this was a major shift from the year before, where we had female buyers, but we hadn't truly, you know, really conscientiously attacked them. Um, that sounded violent. Uh, so what is important is that Black Friday did not introduce the brand. It converted people who already knew us because of the effort we put in in October and early November.

Oh, wait, we're going the wrong way. Here we go. Okay, so, I want to talk about two types of ads. These evergreen gifting ads that were already in the account marinating, um, you know, doing their job for a month, and then these new Black Friday-specific ads. So our evergreen gifting ads drove a ton of performance during Black Friday. They didn't stop working once the sale, once the deal happened. Um, they continued to acquire new customers throughout the period. But, um, we'd already proved the product was good. We weren't relying on a deal to get them to click through. Um, they weren't just there for the discount. They genuinely wanted the product. We had convinced them. Um, but at the same time, the Black Friday-specific ads were much more bottom of the funnel. They were especially effective at converting returning and high-intent buyer, uh, high-intent buyers, and basically providing that final push. So the two things, the two types of ads really worked together is what allowed us to scale without breaking performance.

So then we get to December. Um, and it's really important because, you know, the deal is over, but it is still gifting season, and this strategy continued to work. It had legs. So evergreen ads have been continuing to acquire new customers, and holiday campaigns were about 94% new customer driven. So this is how we knew that gifting was the strategy and the deal was just the accelerator.

Um, so this, we'll talk about this demographic shift here. So starting earlier, like I said, changed who bought. When we zoom out year over year, the impact becomes very clear. Um, performance was driven by an increase in female customers. Female, the percentage of buyers, uh, that were female increased 13%. But men's, the men purchasers still grew. We were not cannibalizing the market. We were expanding it. Um, which is really, really important. We did not abandon our core demographic.

And what this proved is that, like I said, Black Friday did not create demand. It released demand that already existed. So everything before the deal was about teaching, and the deal just gave people permission to act. And that's why performance looked so different.

So, for 2026, there's this repeatable framework that we all should think about when we're going into tentpole events like Mother's Day, Father's Day, back to school, holidays, whatever your product like aligns with, whatever tentpole event. And the framework is Marinate, Motivate, Monetize. So Marinate starts about a month before the tentpole event. It's where you teach the buyer. You are not asking them for action. You are just building familiarity and confidence and clarity about why this is a good choice. Then you move to Motivate. That's your tentpole window. That's where your urgency or value belongs. This is not education. It's giving people a reason for people to act now. And then Monetize is about scaling what's working. So you can keep an evergreen ad on because it's still acquiring new customers, and you just layer in your tentpole-specific creative to close high-intent and returning buyers. So at that point, you're not guessing, you're just amplifying proven winners. Um, yes. So that...

Yes, and so the final slide to summarize, um, this is how I'm going to be going into 2026 and how I'm going to be thinking about this. So, you start early enough before the pressure hits, before CPMs go up. Once CPMs are up, you are not testing, you're just hoping and praying and, you know, crying. Um, you prioritize the real decision-maker. Figure out who that is for that tentpole event. You know, for mothers, maybe it's fathers or kids. For Father's Day, it's probably mothers leading the charge. Um, and you, you really, you really want to focus on that person. You don't want to go after like these small random personas. Think about who is your moneymaker and go after them. You are also giving the algorithm time to learn, uh, and creative time to iterate before you ask it to scale, because you can't shortcut that. And then finally, you are using tentpoles to convert, not explain. So really, ultimately, the biggest wins for tentpole events don't come from the week everybody is obsessed with and like refreshing Shopify. They come from the weeks before that. So the performance of your tentpole event isn't about just about the ads you made for it. It's about whether you did your homework leading up to that event.

Evan Lee Round of applause, everybody. Round of applause.

Joanna Wallace Thank you.

Evan Lee Jo, we have time for one question that popped up.

Joanna Wallace Awesome.

Evan Lee > [VISUAL: Q&A overlay on screen. Text: "Kira Llagas 8:34 PM For Joanna Wallace: how are your teams producing the creative quickly and efficiently when social platforms require you to pivot fast once you see what's working or not?"]

Cool. So I can actually pull this one on screen, but I'll just, uh, I'll try my best to summarize what I see. So how are your teams producing the creative quickly and efficiently?

Joanna Wallace Hmm. Yes. So I think it's important to, don't wait. There's like this, this window between I have enough signal to think that this is doing well and it's got $100,000 spend, it's proven that it's doing well, now I can officially, you know, uh, uh, scale it. You gotta really look at those early indicators and you gotta act fast. Um, so for my team, it's very much of what is the light lift way that you can scale while you work in the background on the heavier lifts. So if something is really working, we can do a quick visual refresh. We can change the POV. Maybe it's male voiceover, now it's going to be female voiceover. Now it's changing to, you know, speaking to older women versus younger women. Um, meanwhile, I'll go and, you know, my team will go and do all the heavy lifting of let's go find a new creator. Let's go think of a new style. Let's go build out graphics. Those things take longer. So you really have to have those light lift ways of like immediate scaling, and then you can have your grand plans roll out a little bit slower.

Evan Lee Jo, you're incredible. The examples and the, and especially with the data behind it, absolutely amazing. Thanks a ton. I'm going to talk to you really soon, okay?

Joanna Wallace Thank you. Thanks so much.

Evan Lee Bye.

Joanna Wallace Bye.