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.

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

💸 Derek Lauermann shares how to spend your next ad dollar

🗞️ Top five headlines from this week in consumer (DTC) news

Cherene Aubert CEO, Growth Capital

Cherene Aubert is the CEO at Growth Capital (X or LinkedIn). Formerly SVP of Digital & Ecommerce at ILIA Beauty, she has grown DTC brands for two decades.

Beyond Black Friday: Complete Month-by-Month Strategy to Win Q4 + 2027

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 2026 while setting you up for sustainable growth in 2027.

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

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

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, determined to preserve a brand people love.

1️⃣ New Reach 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.

Do not wait until November to scale spend.

New accounts reached before BFCM serves as a leading indicator of BFCM performance. If you don’t build the audience now, you’ll pay 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. The temptation says, “We’re desperate for growth, let’s do an incredibly long sale,” but 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 2027 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 starting right now. 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 just 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: Q4 → 2027 

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.

• VIP sales
• Sampling
• Giveaways

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

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.

At ILIA, we liked sampling because we had predictability on people who try them. Samplers come back; we knew the rate at which they repurchase.

New account reach initiatives.

Give new audiences a chance to discover your brand before BFCM.

That could mean upper-funnel media, shifting more budget to TikTok, or a giveaway that brings new people onto your email list.

October: Holiday Soft Launch

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

My favorite tactic: 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 they work great in October.

You can use them for both scale and clearing out inventory. Don’t discount core or hero collections. For these, 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

Before 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 at ILIA.

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.

High-intent lead generation exposes people ahead of the sale. 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 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.

Introduce a new gift with purchase during BFCM weekend. Give customers who already shopped the sale another reason to come back without increasing the discount.

You can also launch with a macro or mid-tier influencer not talking about the sale. It helps 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.

I’m pretty militant on internal meetings.

Do daily standups, even if they’re 15 to 30 minutes between 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 in a special collection.

Then there’s expedited shipping. You can run offers during both.

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

For example, if bundles sell out on DTC or they can’t be delivered on time, shamelessly redirect people to retailers.

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

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) 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 if you want the full playbook, this article is only the annotated version of my full 20-min value concussion I dropped during Operators Black Friday Event.

Hit reply to this email and tell Aaron …

I heard a lot of you wrote back last week to get MacCoy’s. More better write back for this one!

Derek Lauermann VP of Growth, Grüns

Where Should You Spend Your Next Advertising Dollar?

At Grüns, we put a lot of money into advertising. That means every assumption we make about where to allocate budget has the potential to be an expensive mistake.

Platform-reported and MTA tell us which touchpoints were nearby when someone bought. They don’t tell us whether those customers would have bought anyway.

I want to know …

So when Olivia Kory from Haus joined Marketing Operators to talk incrementality, MMM, and agentic media buying, I was obviously snacking!

Here were my three takeaways.

1️⃣ Test Your Biggest Bets

Should you spend 10% more on Meta? Could you cut retargeting without losing sales? Does branded search drive conversions? Would your next advertising dollar produce more incremental results if it was spent on Google, CTV, or podcasts?

Start with the question where acting on the answer could drive the most growth … or prevent the most wasted spend.

You don’t need to test every uncertainty.

You need to test the ones where a better decision is worth the time and money it takes to get an answer.

2️⃣ Bad Results Are Good

The point of testing isn’t to be right. It’s to understand true impact and make better budget decisions.

On the pod Connor Rolain shared a test where video-view objectives went up against purchase optimization.
​
Views were not incremental.

So they turned them off and put the budget somewhere more productive.

That’s a win!

3️⃣ Match the Tool to the Decision

I’m not waiting on a geo test to decide which Meta campaign gets another $500 tomorrow. I’m also not letting attribution decide whether Meta deserves another $500K.

Macro:

• Incrementality
• MMM
• Marginal return

Micro:

• MTA
• Platform data
• Directional signal

Use incrementality tests to inform big budget decisions. Then use those findings to calibrate MMM and put day-to-day platform and MTA reporting in context.

THE FEED

​How to Raise Money For DTC Brands: Help an Operator Out​

​How Away’s CEO Jessica Schinazi Took a DTC-Only, $1.4B Unicorn Omnichannel​

​HexClad + Ridge Reveal Their DTC Sweepstakes Playbooks​

​Our Ecommerce Marketing Strategy vs. Real Data Post-Launch: Operators Build (E8)​

The Trends

The five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. October Sales Bring In $9.86B Online: Retail Dive​

U.S. shoppers spent $9.86B online during October 6–7, as Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days and competing promotions kicked off holiday shopping. According to Adobe, mobile sales grew 12.8% YoY to $5.1B, accounting for 52% of spending.

Discounts reached 20% off listed prices and encouraged shoppers to buy higher-priced products. Numerator also found that half of Amazon’s event shoppers compared prices at other retailers.

2. Boots Agrees to $8.9B Acquisition: PR Newswire​

The Canadian Weston family’s Wittington Investments agreed to acquire Boots and associated businesses for $8.9B, including debt, in partnership with Fairfax Financial. The deal includes Boots’ UK and Ireland stores, Boots Opticians, and No7 Beauty Company.

Wittington plans to invest in store upgrades, ecommerce, and healthcare services. The transaction is expected to close in Q1 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and customary conditions.

3. MadeGood Returns to Family Ownership: Prelude Growth​

The Fotovat family bought back Prelude Growth Partners’ minority stake in Riverside Natural Foods, the parent company of MadeGood. During the four-year partnership, the snack brand increased net sales 2.5x while expanding manufacturing and retail distribution.

Riverside produces its products in its own allergen-free facilities. The transaction reportedly values the business at more than $1B and returns it to full family ownership.

4. AI Shopping Agents Can See Shopify Markdowns: Shopify​

Shopify now shares compare-at prices with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog. Previously, agents reading the catalog could see a product’s current price but couldn’t see the markdown displayed on the merchant’s storefront.

The update provides the reference price alongside the selling price, making discounts visible to agents. Merchants can control whether that information is shared through the Compare-at setting in their Shopify admin.

5. Constellation Acquires SpikedAde: Nasdaq​

Constellation Brands acquired canned cocktail brand SpikedAde for $75M upfront, with up to $278M in additional payments tied to performance over five years. Founded by Jason Cohen, SpikedAde combines sports drink-inspired flavors with vodka in a noncarbonated, zero-sugar format.

The brand has established distribution across the eastern U.S. Constellation will take over production oversight, marketing, and distribution as it works to expand the brand nationally.

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

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