In our lives, we’ve hit peak “it’s never a dull moment.”

The December timeline is a non-stop stream of brand experiments, trend peaks, tech fleece pop-up shops, caviar as a rebrand, perhaps ribboncore aesthetic derivatives… Meanwhile, brands try to understand if everyone is down or if it’s just them, and the intense procrastination on 2024 planning is brutally real.

Let’s dive in.

Holiday Data

Every November and December, the builder’s group chats become inundated with questions. What discount amount is right for sale items?

When to start the sale?

Should we do a sale at all?

Double down in December?

Using Particl, I looked at the UK men’s streetwear brand Cole Buxton and their data. Note: they averaged about 100 sales a day through most of Q4, dropping to about 60 a day before Black Friday, then got up close to 1000 a day during their sale and maintained high momentum after.

Particl shows average discounts in time periods, too; this brand ran 30-70% and had its biggest volume on their biggest discount, but followed by a smaller discount on a much more in-demand item.

But the most interesting tidbit for me is while unit sales were driven by discounted items, revenue was still driven by full-priced items.

A great data point to position against doing a sitewide sale. Only one sale item made top items by revenue from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.

You can watch a full overview here, where I dig a bit into Buck Mason (who notoriously avoids discounts as well).

I also looked at Represent’s data… and they are doing as well as they say online. Legendary scaling.

Learn more about Particl.

Disclaimer - I did a sponsored post for the video above, but I’m sharing here because it is actually very useful.

A Quick & Dirty Guide to Merchandising

Congrats to our friends at Graza for entering their big box retail era. This is a great opportunity to talk about merchandising. What are the affordable (and unaffordable) options to physically market your brand in stores?

Here is our quick terminology breakdown of some of the more popular options you have for retail merchandising (this is by no means comprehensive, but it should get your wheels turning).

Aisle Interruptor - this is what you see above, a graphic that comes from the shelf to call out a specific product.

Wobbler - very similar, a smaller merchandising piece that is viewed straight on when looking at the shelf. An easy, cheap win to try to spark an in-category purchase.

Pallete (or ½ or ¼ pallet) - the product ships in a cardboard display unit that helps show off the product and merchandise an assortment (accessories or various options) in a way the brand believes best shows the product.

Works best for stores that display palettes on places on the floor (Walmart, Costco, hardware, etc) and less for strongly merchandised locations (Target, fashion retail, etc).

Endcap - Taking over the end of an entire row for product promotion – this often (but not always) comes at a fee from the retailer for this level of display. Sometimes this is executed with a full design and buildout, sometimes it can be just a full product takeover.

In-line - Displays that exist inside the row of the store. You’ll find in best-buy most categories feature in-line display.

Shippers - Using the carrier of the product as a merchandising piece to draw attention on the shelf, where the shipper can be removed for the product to be put in normally or just put directly on the shelf as a showcase.

With all of these you have to consider the cost of production (so the early you can plan in your process the better, especially for something like the shipper above), and the cost of implementation.

Putting a shipper on the shelf is easy, but you may have to work through an installer to get your in-line displays in and then think about maintenance programs, etc, as well.

Kitchen Sink

HYPER Reports

Check out our market reports. We spend many, many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space–all so that you don’t have to.

How to Source Blanks 101 — HERE​ 
A guide to finding and producing your own merch

Market reports on Running, Golf and Tennis — HERE
A guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand

Looking for brand strategy, research, or merchandise support?

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We’d love to chat!

Oren ​& Clayton ❤️ you