The best Q4s are the calmest

The Q4s I look back on as our most successful were also the calmest, which is kind of the inverse of what most people expect. That's because the fundamentals you run the rest of the year are what really determine your success at Christmas. More and more brands keep pushing their holiday sale start toward November 1 or even earlier, and I strongly disagree with that.

We've tested the longer window, and what happened was revenue spread out over more days. It didn't necessarily drive anything incremental. Stretch a sale across two months and it starts to have an always-on feel. Keep it finite, where the message is more like "this launches today and it ends in a few days," and you get the urgency back.

Tighten the window

The longer the promo window, the less urgency you have and the fewer things you can pull out of the tool chest. Tighten it up and you can go deeper on the discount, and your last-chance messaging starts to mean something. Customers also learn there's a specific window when you discount, and we barely discount the rest of the year, so they know that too.

Q4 is decided before Q4

When we keep discounting tight the rest of the year, we see an outsized response in Q4, double digit growth year over year in the top periods. You give up margin while the sale runs, but the volume should keep you whole on contribution dollars.

Most of your Q4 is decided by what you did in the first three quarters. Promos multiply whatever baseline you built, so if your brand health has been climbing and you've been disciplined, Q4 is going to be good. Those are the metrics I'm watching leading in.

Run it calm

Black Friday through Cyber Monday should be one of the calmer stretches of your year. You still need to be reactive to what's happening, but the plan should already be made.

Every year there's a nervous period before the promotion turns on, and I've learned to almost ignore it. The season probably won't play out exactly like you think it will, but if your strategy is grounded in data, previous periods and previous years, you should stick to the course. Your ability to execute the plan is worth more than changing the offer last minute.

You want to be in the comparison

I'm not anti-promotion. I'm anti-reckless promotion. Q4 is the one that makes sense, because it's what people are looking for. Any time there's a cultural moment where people are hunting for deals, I think you want to be a participant unless you're ultra premium.

We all think better of our brand than other people do. Unless you're ultra luxury where there are no substitutes, holiday shoppers are comparing you against similar products, and if you're not discounting, you're not in the comparison, and you're missing the biggest acquisition moment of the year.

Inside the window

Once the sale turns on, the window itself is the only hard rule, and we think about going as aggressive as possible inside it. We go sitewide with simple messaging and do everything we can to maximize volume. If we're going to discount, we want it driving AOV too, so bundles and multi-product discounts make sense.

What trains customers to wait is seeing you on sale all the time. A deep offer inside one finite window doesn't train anybody, because the window caps how often you're on sale.

Most of the year, our customers are buying for themselves. During the holidays that switches a little, so headlines, ads, and emails move to gifting. After the holidays we point everything at the gift you wish you'd gotten.

Focus on 2027

If you haven't built demand for the brand by this point in 2026, and you're not really small, your Q4 topline isn't going to be as high as you want it to be. It's kind of already too late to make massive changes. Nothing you do between now and November is going to move your Q4 topline more than about 15%, give or take. The same effort pointed at next year will move a lot more than that. I think that's actually why people run longer promo windows. They haven't built the demand, so they're looking for revenue without doing the fundamentals that take longer.

So make your decisions with that lens. Refocus on 2027. In the lead-up to that holiday, get your discount rate down and put top-of-funnel awareness spend into high-value mediums for your customer. For us that's YouTube and TV. For you it might be different channels depending on where your customer hangs out, or different activations if retail is where you live. Your Q4 is driven by the rest of your year, and 2027 is the year you can still change. That's the biggest bang for your buck.

Pull your previous Q4s and compare them by promo window. If the sale ran November 1 to the end of the month one year and November 15 to the 30th another, compare the total revenue each promo did, assuming the offers were similar and there aren't other variables you're not accounting for. If the longer window didn't do meaningfully more, your window is too long. Reply with what you find.