Revenue Growth on Black Friday 

The Black Friday holiday sale can play a major part in the annual success of consumer businesses. Because it plays such an important role, we decided to analyze how the last two years have gone for some of our clients to see if there is anything to be learned.

  • Overall revenue increased by an average of 20.4%, industry-wise, led by Food & Beverage more than doubling year-over-year compared to Apparel, which actually declined by 6.4% year-over-year.
  • Across the entire sample size, the Top 10 performing brands grew +160% from 2020 to 2021 (see the second graph).
  • A total of 37 brands increased total revenue, while 21 declined. It did not really matter if a company was in Beauty, Food & Bev, Apparel or if you were doing less than 25K/mo or 500K/mo. Each channel or demographic (in company size) had both high growth brands and ones that declined.

This is great information to help make better decisions for 2022. At the end of the day, there is no magic bullet or perfect trend to follow. Both physical stores and online performed well. The trick is finding the right balance for your business.

  • Our brands, while fighting through the increases in CAC and people returning to in-store purchasing locations after covid restricting this in 2020, have continued to grow their online presence and revenue year-over-year (in aggregate).
  • Growth from online spending through 2020 to 2021 has slowed compared to how online shopping has been growing over the past few years, but it still saw an increase.

For context, we did a 4-day comparison of revenue from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Our sample size was 58 companies.