Finally, some good news. According to Circana numbers, Black Friday week was +17% versus last year, and +8% on the same week in 2023. I am sure this will be extremely welcome news for all toy suppliers and retailers – finally there are some black numbers amongst the sea of red we’ve seen so far in Q4.
Fingers crossed that trend continued the following week, which incorporated Cyber Monday. It’s a huge relief all round for sure, although I do want to offer some context and a few thoughts. First, given the prevalence of retail deals across the whole of November, it is notable that the barrage of special offers only really had a significant impact on sales numbers in the final week of the month.
Now, of course, you can post-rationalize that outcome in several ways. Perhaps the relentless onslaught of ever-increasing reductions finally wore consumers down. Maybe the deals were better that particular week, or consumers were finally in a buying mood driven by incessant Black Friday messaging. Or – and this is my suspicion – people had just been paid, so had money in their pocket / bank account to allow them to splurge.
If you go along with this explanation, does that make all the previous offers across the month leading up to Black Friday a bit… well, pointless? I’ll leave you to decide whether that’s the case or not. I will only say that I can’t be the only person who feels the whole ‘Black Friday creep’ – going from a day to a week to a month – has perhaps gone a touch too far.
Read the rest here.
