Why We (Almost Never) Do Sales – And When We Do

You know I’m a big fan of a bit of business transparency, so I wanted to chat about why businesses run sales – especially as today marks the start of our once-a-year, birthday discount. We are not a business that does regular discounts - in fact we are now limiting it to once a year as we are no longer going to be doing our pre-Christmas early order promotion (as I'll explain later).

So here it is: the behind-the-scenes of why eCommerce businesses lower their prices, what those discounts are really about and what ours is about today.

Plenty of businesses run discounts as a regular part of their sales and marketing strategy. They know customers often need a gentle nudge over the line, so they build discounts regularly into their calendar – maybe across their entire range, or just on select products – as a way of driving momentum. In these cases, the business prices the discount in, knowing that it will be rolling it out every valentines, every mother’s day, every easter… you get my drift. That means they set their usual prices 15–20% higher than they need to, knowing they’ll often be dropping them down.

It’s a bit like those shops we all know where you’d never pay full price. You just wait for the sale to roll around – and it always does. These businesses become known for their discounts, so their customers learn to hold off and only buy when there’s a promo on. The sales cycle becomes a pattern of peaks and troughs, not a nice steady hum of orders.

From what I gather, this is a much more common approach in the US than here in the UK, where we tend to be a bit more reserved with our discounts. In the States, it’s practically expected. Over here, less so.

This approach is not something we do, or plan to do, because I want our products to be priced fairly and appropriately all year round (as I’ve written about before here). We’re a small business and wild swings in demand are tricky for us to manage operationally. More than that, I think there’s an integrity point here – I don’t want to run a business that feels like it’s coercing customers into buying with heavy-handed tactics. There’s no more heavy-handed sales technique than pushing you a time-limited discount. You should buy when you’re ready, not because I’m trying to pressure you with a ticking clock and flashing banners. Personally, I don’t think regular discounts encourage thoughtful, sensible shopping – and I’d rather we all kept our heads and just priced our products appropriately all year round.

The second reason for a sale is to do with timing. Sometimes you want to move around when orders come in, and you’re willing to take a little hit to your margins to do that. There are a couple of reasons for this.

One reason is operational – maybe you want to shift the rush of demand to a time you can better manage. In our case, for the last few years we’ve run a November offer: 15% off if you’re happy to place your Christmas order early and wait for 6-8 weeks for it to actually come. In this case, that discount is our thank-you for helping us smooth things out behind the scenes, but only will ever appeal to those who are happy to wait for their order to arrive. So it's not a pure discount in the sense that we are asking you to give us something back in exchange... patience!

You see, if all our Christmas orders landed in the first week of December, we’d be in trouble. We’re a small team and our kits take a fair bit of labour to assemble – we can’t scale production up and down easily (and frankly, nor do I want to see the team sweating it out, frantically packing boxes – we want to enjoy the festive period just like you). By offering an early bird discount, we encourage people to spread out their orders – and that makes everything run much more smoothly. As it would happen, this year it didn’t really do what we had hoped as I’ll explain later – so that is the last time we will be doing a discount to help with spreading out orders!

The other timing-related reason is cash flow. You might notice a lot of businesses start wheeling out a sale around Easter or late spring. That’s because this is the time of year we all start placing our big Christmas stock orders – even though it’s also the quietest part of the year in terms of sales. Especially in seasonal businesses like ours (not much stitching happens when the sun’s out and the pub gardens are calling), you often have to make your biggest financial commitments just before your quietest few months.

So, a sale at this time of year helps fill the coffers. But you go into it knowing you’re not really gaining extra orders overall – you’re just pulling them forward. Sales will peak during the discount, but then things will naturally quieten down for a bit. On the whole, you might not end up with any more revenue across the quarter – in fact, probably a bit less, because you’ve offered a discount. But the business runs more smoothly, it enables you to grow and that’s often worth it.

The third reason to run a sale is to shift inventory. Maybe you over-ordered a particular SKU, or perhaps you’ve got new collections arriving and need to clear space. Either way, discounting leftover stock helps reduce waste and frees up resources.

This is a big one in the fashion industry – autumn/winter this year isn’t the same as next, so you have to clear out the old before bringing in the new. These kinds of sales can be front and centre – think post-Christmas clearance – or more under-the-radar, like sample sales. For smaller brands, that’s often where you’ll see older stock quietly being moved on – deadstock, discontinued lines, designs that aren’t quite on-brand anymore but are still perfectly lovely and deserve a good home.

Fortunately, this isn’t something we really deal with. We’re not a trend-led brand, we don’t do seasonal collections, and we very rarely discontinue products. When we do, we’re not in a rush to get rid of the last few – we’re happy to let them sell down in their own time. We use the same materials across multiple products and prep in small quantities, so we’re pretty confident we’ll always sell through what we’ve made.

Maybe, one day, we’ll decide it’s time to retire a collection (although every time we discuss this as a team we all can't bring ourselves to be so heartless!) – and if we do, we might well run a sample sale to give those last few kits a final hurrah. But for now, inventory isn’t a driver for our sales.

And finally, the emotional reason – possibly the nicest one. This is the desire to simply give something back. Not to shift stock, not to smooth cash flow, not to drum up sales during a slow patch. Just because.

I hadn’t really realised this was even a ‘thing’ until we started planning this year’s birthday sale. I was a sceptic and assumed all businesses would only ever do sales for one of the three previous reasons. However, none of those reasons apply to why we are doing the birthday sale this year.

For the past four years, we’ve run a little birthday discount at the end of May. While we’ve always called it a ‘birthday’ offer, it’s largely been about timing – that need to top up funds ahead of placing big Christmas orders, as mentioned above. It's just very handy that our anniversary falls at the perfect time of year to use it as an excuse.

But this year, something’s different. We’ve just had the busiest start to a year we’ve ever had – which is frankly amazing given the current consumer spending climate (which is bleak to say the least!) – and, for the first time, we feel genuinely comfortable making the investments we need for the Christmas we want to have, without calling on your help. So from a purely business point of view, we don’t need to run a birthday sale this year.

But then I realised something: the people who tend to make the most of the birthday sale aren’t new customers. They’re our existing ones – the lovely lot who’ve stitched a few kits already and are coming back for their next project, or finally getting that painted frame they’ve been eyeing up. And it hit me that while most businesses are quick to offer a discount to first-time customers – the classic “10% off your first order” – there’s very little out there for the loyal regulars.

You either have a loyalty scheme, or… well, you don’t.

We did once try a loyalty scheme – and those of you who’ve been with us a while might remember it (The Fabled Friends, anyone??). It was really very clunky. Unless you were some kind of tech wizard, it was impossible to understand how it worked, let alone use the points you’d collected. We spent so much time helping people out with it, or saw so many people building points without even knowing it, that it just wasn't actually serving any purpose other than an admin headache. Unfortunately the plug-in loyalty apps were all rubbish, and building our own system would cost an arm and a leg. So, for now at least, it’s off the table.

Which means, in practice, we rarely offer anything in the way of monetary thank-yous to our regulars. And that just doesn’t sit right. If we scrapped the birthday sale altogether, you’d be left with nothing – no first-timer perks, no loyalty points – and that feels unfair. Especially when you’re the very people who’ve kept this business ticking over year after year.

So, even though we don’t need to run a sale, we want to. As a little gesture. As a “thank you” that’s available to everyone, not just the shiny new faces.

Side note: We also won’t be doing our usual pre-Christmas discount this year. Last year’s was actually too successful and far more people took advantage of the early order discount than expected. So whilst we ended up having more time to fulfil the orders, we ended up taking nearly our entire festive periods orders from the year before in a matter of days. We got everything out on time, but we ended up having to get freelance help in to help us deal with the orders, and then there was the logistical challenge of making sure orders placed without the early discount were sent on normal timings compared to those with the discount. It sounds simple in theory but every small additional check you have to do when packing an order is an opportunity to cock it up (it's one of the reasons we only offer one fixed shipping rate - but that's a story for another time). In actual fact, it would have just been easy to have a bigger team, prepare more stock in advance and let you order when you wanted to order. So you won’t be seeing us doing that one again – lesson learnt!

It’s a small way for us to say thank you – for being here, for stitching with us, and for helping make this small business a thing that still exists. But don’t feel pressure to take advantage – this is there for you to choose to use if you want to, not because we need you to in order to keep us going!