Here’s what this email doesn’t have.

Cliché advice to start your sale earlier + discount deeper.

Short-sighted tactics that’ll leave you, your brand, and your customers hungover after the holidays.

And the best thing it doesn’t have?

A framework that’s too-little, too-late.

Instead, this is a month-by-month breakdown of how to win Black Friday and launch into 2026

🎁 Cherene Aubert reveals a holiday plan for driving Q4 → Q1

🎟️ Sean Frank wants you to meet this year’s winners for free

🤓 Aaron Orendorff invites you to a masterclass (with prizes)

Plus, this week’s five biggest headlines in consumer news with summaries and links.

Sean Frank

CEO, Ridge

Want to see how 8-10 figure sellers are-
STILL WINNING RIGHT NOW?

My friend Jared Orkin is putting on Innovate 2025 in New York City next week. If you can, you should go.

I have 10 free tickets.

These speakers will be there.

- Hudson from COMFRT (so hot)
- Isaac Medeiros, candy, swords, I invested
- Jay Hunter → built MaryRuth HUGE
- Ezra Firestone the OG you know
- Jabran from Utopia $700M on Amazon

And more speakers too

Code ActivateTalent2025 for FREE ticket

Normally $800.

I have spoken there before. So has Mike Beckham and Jason Panzer and Cody Plofker. We recommend it; not sponsored.

Get Your Free Ticket

Cherene Aubert

SVP, ILIA Beauty

Cherene Aubert is the SVP of Digital & Ecommerce at ILIA Beauty (X or LinkedIn). She’s appeared multiple times on the Operators Podcast + our online events.

Beyond Black Friday: Complete Month-by-Month Strategy to Win Q4 + 2026

I know what you’re thinking.

Another holiday playbook telling me to “start your sale earlier” or “increase your discount from 25% to 30%.”

Wrong! That’s not what this is about.

Instead, I want to help you build a framework that turns Q4 into your biggest acquisition moment of 2025 while setting you up for sustainable growth in 2026.

Because here’s what most brands miss …

Yes, the majority of your Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) volume comes from existing customers. And sure, your top repeat order cohorts during BFCM were likely acquired during past sale moments.

But the real purpose of everything you do during the holiday season is two-fold.

Open the floodgates of new customers. Catapult yourself into Q1.

Before we get into the month-by-month framework on how to drive insane amounts of revenue without burning egregious piles of cash, you need to understand the four traps that kill growth.

Four Q4 Traps That Kill Growth

These come from working with multiple nine-figure companies in it for the long haul — profitable and growing, omnichannel, and determined to preserve a brand people love.

1️⃣ New Reached Crisis

If you’ve ever looked at your Rolling Reach report in Meta or any other ad platform, you’ll see CPMs get insanely expensive. We’re talking 200-400% spikes in November and December.

Translation? It’s harder + more expensive to reach new accounts when you need them most.

Are you waiting until November to scale spend? Backwards approach.

New accounts reached before BFCM serve as a leading indicator of BFCM performance. If you’re not building the audience now, you’re paying luxury CPMs later trying to catch up.

2️⃣ Early & Extended Sale Trap

Month-long, sitewide promotions dilute your brand.

They’re very hard to comp year over year. While the temptation says, “We’re desperate for growth, let’s do an incredibly long sale,” you have to consider the long-term impact.

For omnichannel businesses, retail partners suffer because you’re trading sales when running extended promotions on DTC. Then you have an issue in January where you’ve pulled forward so much demand, you’re not setting yourself up in 2026 for sustainable growth.

3️⃣ Creative Fatigue Cliff

If you’re running the same creative all Q4 — even evergreen ads that perform throughout the year — you will burn them out fast because of the insane amounts of money you’re spending.

High CPMs plus high frequency equals budget drain.

Don’t wait until late November or early December. And definitely don’t come into January with fatigued ads.

Invest heavily in diversity now and build your ad creative pipeline for January in Q4. You want to hit the new year with a steady stream of net new content.

4️⃣ Offer Innovation Stagnation

Honestly, this one is the root problem of the other three.

Running a sitewide discount, deepening it as the holiday season progresses, and expecting better results is deceptively easy. But I haven’t seen a meaningful lift in sales by going from 20% to 25% or 25% to 30%.

You’re giving up points of margin.

When it comes to running longer offers, being creative with multiple formats unlocks more peaks during the BFCM season.

You need a framework addressing timing, creative, and channel coordination.

Let’s get into the month-by-month execution.

Month-By-Month Playbook: Q4 → 2026

September Reach and Acquire

Even though we’re well into October, I’m keeping my September plan in here so you can come back to it next year as your last best awareness window.

The key? Focus on loyalty building and groundswell acquisition.

On the ILIA Beauty website, we ran VIP sales last month.

Loyalty is crucial for omnichannel brands to maintain their commitment to DTC. My favorite is SMS exclusive offers to enroll people into the program.

We know members produce higher overall LTV. They purchase more, they’re more engaged with the brand.

For CPG brands, another tactic I love is sampling campaigns to seed trials. Get people in, acquire them with your best first-purchase product, and prime them for repurchase.

We like doing sampling because we have predictability on people who try them. Samplers come back; we know the rate at which they’ll repurchase.

New account reach initiatives.

We ran a hold-out test to understand the impact of top-of-funnel campaign objectives in Meta and their incremental sales lift.

The hypothesis …

Upper funnel campaign types help us reach new accounts, which in turn makes our conversion campaigns more efficient.

October Holiday Soft Launch

Here’s when you start talking holiday + seasonal positioning and merchandising without diluting demand and without pulling forward sales.

We have limited-edition bundles launching from early October until the end of the year.

They serve two purposes.

First, low AOV bundles for customer acquisition. Second, high AOV limited bundles for existing customers (delight and repurchase). Customers think of them differently than BFCM shopping. That’s why we love doing it in October.

As a brand not discounting often, we use them for both scale and clearing out inventory. We won’t discount our core or hero collections. We’ll discount the products needing to be moved.

Gift with purchase comes commonly with early holiday positioning. Seasonal excitement without demand dilution.

November Cut Through the Noise

The BFCM wild west descends. Your focus? Strategic promotion timing and creative iteration.

On creative diversity.

Above is a real example of sale creative we ran last year.

Very brand-forward, you might not expect it to convert well. It did. On top of performance, customers engaged. They loved it. Positive comments poured in.

You don’t have to go rent a vintage Porsche, but you do have to remember that nobody loves ads. No one wants to see ads. Not even during BFCM. Think through diversity from that lens.

On promotion timing.

If you run month-long offers, I’d encourage you not to run them as sitewide sales.

Thankfully, there are other offers you can push in November — like gifts with purchase or deeper discounts on your bundles.

Being ready to start early matters too. You don’t have to kick off early, but you do need everything locked in.

Another tactic I strongly believe in …

Influencer content creates awareness, inspiration, and desire ahead of the sale. Not influencers promoting a discount. Influencers selling the product benefits and bringing new audiences into the brand.

We do high-intent lead generation to expose people ahead of the sale. Especially to get people into our lists. And it has to be high intent. Looks different for every brand.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday

The peak of demand. Everybody unleashes spend. Wild west time. Creative and offer warfare.

No matter what you do, most consumers will wait to purchase during BFCM itself. Some will buy before, if you start your offers early + you are able to reconvert them.

Still, the majority wait because they’ve been trained to expect better offers.

I strongly discourage launching a deeper discount during Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend.

There’s nothing more infuriating to your customers than to purchase and then see you went deeper. I don’t actually think it drives much more lift either.

Having a differentiated offer, however, matters.

At ILIA, we’ll introduce a new or different or better gift with purchase. We’ve seen we’re able to reconvert a higher volume of people who’ve already purchased.

We also launch with a macro or mid-tier influencer not talking about the sale. It’s how you break through the noise.

There are people on social media looking at content and don’t want to see 50 static ads saying 30% off.

How are you getting those people? How are you getting in front of them and engaging them? Incredibly important to us.

I’m pretty militant on internal meetings.

We do daily standups, even if they’re 15 to 30 minutes between our growth, creative, and ecommerce teams — whoever’s working on creative, the site, and in the ad accounts. Even on Thanksgiving and weekends.

It’s super necessary for those people to work together and do daily iterations. Of course, you can cancel the standup if there’s nothing to talk over or manage it async.

December Go Hard on Urgency

The shipping cutoff cliff. Boxing Day. Slow-moving inventory liquidation (as needed).

A great opportunity before the holiday shipping cutoff is to unload excess inventory. Include it in a gift with purchase to create low threshold incentives.

Or, just discount it to the hilt.

Then there’s expedited shipping. We run offers during both.

Post-shipping cutoff? Major on digital products or push directly to Amazon or retail (if items are unavailable).

For example, we’ll have limited edition bundles on our DTC. If they sell out or can’t be delivered in time, we will shamelessly redirect people to retailers to capture the demand.

Don’t forget Boxing Day after Christmas in core non-US markets. If you’re running international in Canada, UK, Australia, and other countries, there’s a huge opportunity after Christmas.

January Slump or Pump

Everything you did up until this point will impact how you kick off the rest of the year.

If you listened to me, you already have a creative backlog to combat fatigue.

The point? Great moment to (1) lean into partnerships, (2) cross-sell those Q4 cohorts you acquired, and (3) to launch into New Year or Valentine’s Day bundles that encourage repurchase.

For subscription businesses, you can incentivize to drive further repurchase of those customers you acquired.

Amazon peaks for a lot of businesses as you get those last-minute, end-of-year shoppers in December. January offers an opportunity to either slump or pump based on what you’ve done the rest of the quarter and what you have planned.

TLDR: Framework Beats Tactics

Have a clear offer strategy for each month. That’s how you fuel long-term + sustainable growth.

First, optimize for new customers.

Yes, there are so many tactics to drive repurchase. Those will be a given. Adopt a new customer mindset in everything you do during this season. Your future growth depends on it.

Second, avoid the four growth traps.

Reach new accounts before CPMs spike. Month-long promotions dilute brand and hurt retail partners. Plan your creative pipeline beyond November to avoid January crashes. Use creative offer formats, not deeper discounts.

Third, month-by-month execution.

September means VIP sales and sampling. October brings low and high AOV bundles without demand dilution. November delivers creative and promotional diversity. December offers shipping-cliff urgency and international opportunities. January provides creative reset and cross-selling Q4 cohorts.

Get locked in.

And (as always) if you disagree with anything I’ve said here, please complain directly to Aaron Orendorff.

THE FEED

Thrasio: The Truth With Co-Founder John Hefter

Operators Titans E003: Musely With CEO Jack Jia

Chat GPT Shopping, Striking a Balance with SMS & How We’d Build a Marketing Team from Day One

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s biggest headlines in consumer news.

1. Alec’s Ice Cream Bags $11M: FinSMEs

Alec’s Ice Cream secured $11 million in Series A funding as interest in A2 dairy and regenerative agriculture rises. Imaginary Ventures, an investor in Glossier, BERO, and Cann, led the round.

Founded by Alec Jaffe in 2020, Alec’s is now a nationwide player with distribution at Target, Sprouts, and Whole Foods. Other investors in the round include Great Circle Ventures, Altelan Capital, and Dr. Anthony Gustin.

2. Create Goes Omnichannel: Twitter

Create, a pioneer in the creatine category, continues to go omnichannel and just secured nationwide distribution at Target and Sprouts Farmers Market.

The three-year-old wellness brand has grown 5x annually since inception and will grow 3-4 in 2025. Create is in pole position to become the creatine brand — sort of like how Liquid IV is the hydration brand and Armra is the colostrum brand.

3. Curate Capital Backs Nori: LinkedIn

Nori, a consumer hardware startup that reimagined the steam iron for modern consumers, closed a Series A round at a $40M valuation. Houston-based Curate Capital led the round. Founded by former college roommates Courtney Toll + Annabel Love, Nori is now a mid-8-figure brand with only a four-person team. It debuted at 1,800 Target stores earlier this year.

4. Red Bull Breaks Ground on Massive U.S. Facility: LinkedIn

Red Bull just broke ground on a 2.36-million-square-foot manufacturing facility in Concord, North Carolina.

The massive facility is a joint venture between Red Bull, Ball Corporation, and Rauch. The facility will be operational in 2028 and by 2031 will be capable of filling 3 billion cans annually. The facility is also expected to create 700 million jobs.

5. Target Dabbles in THC Beverages: BevNET

Target began selling THC beverages at ten of its stores in the Twin Cities, marking a major win for a category that has experienced regulatory uncertainty since its inception.

A handful of large alcohol retailers like Total Wine & More already sell THC beverages, but Target is the first “mainstream” retailer to endorse the category. It’ll be interesting to see if other retailers like Walmart, Whole Foods, and Kroger follow suit.

Masterclass + Prizes

Alongside Operators Titans, we’ve also put together the ultimate Q4 expansion pack.