“We want to be something desired”: How new Aussie retailers are approaching Black Friday 2024

Despite dire times for the Australian economy, consumers are still keen and willing to participate in retail spending — particularly when sales and discounts are involved. 

Last year, Australians spent approximately $6.36 billion during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend according to the ABS, with that figure expected to rise again this year as the sales spread further than just the traditional weekend period. 

While most retailers have their previous year’s sales reports to refer to when hitting targets for this global weekend, what about the many new and emerging small business retailers across our country? 

SmartCompany chatted with three local Australian retailers hitting the global stage of the BFCM sales period for the first time ever … and one SME that never has and never will. 

The Plotline

Meghan McTavish launched The Plotline — a hardcover journal rooted in the principles of narrative theory — to the market in August, so it is well and truly a newborn child. 

In our “really AI-centric, tech heavy world”, McTavish wanted to bring back the joy of putting pen to paper. 

“I love the idea that people can journal, and some tech company doesn’t get the data,” McTavish says, commenting on how Apple released its own journaling app, Journal, which further demonstrates that “people want to journal”. 

“The demand is clearly there.” 

Since a journal is where people share their deepest thoughts, McTavish wants people to be able to share those thoughts “in a space that can’t be monetised [and manipulated] by Apple”. 

Since the business was launched in such a close capacity to the major sale event, McTavish wasn’t sure if she’d take part. 

“If I’m honest, my ego was saying ‘I don’t want to put The Plotline on sale, because we’re a premium product, la la la…” McTavish trails off, demonstrating how she knows this mentality is shared by her peers. 

“But then I took a step back and [remembered] that the ethos of The Plotline is about being accessible, [our] ethos is letting everyone write their story, because we all have a story. We are living the story of our lives.” 

McTavish has previously worked for small brands that were stocked in large stores such as Sephora, and learnt from those roles that “sales success comes down to being strategic about which sales you participate in”. 

“Everyone knows about Black Friday, [so] it’s the perfect event to find the most people and the biggest audience because then [The Plotline] can help more people,” says McTavish. 

“If I was going to do any sale at any point of the [first] year of the business, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is just the no-brainer.” 

It is a bold move to take 30% off your product a mere two months after launching, but McTavish says she’s done it because it “gives a leeway to not go on sale for the rest of the year”. 

This may change in another month, McTavish says, with Boxing Day being the next big sale event in the e-commerce calendar. 

After all, we’re “approaching the pointy end of the year when everybody wants to make sure they nail 2025, and that’s exactly the territory I’m playing in”. 

Nakey Underwear

For Nakey Underwear founder Lizetta Margaritis, the BFCM sales weekend feels like a “great opportunity to introduce ourselves” considering the brand only launched 12 months ago. 

“We want Nakey to be introduced to as many people as possible,” Margaritis tells SmartCompany, and that includes on an international level considering the Sydney-based retailer already ships worldwide. 

While the sales period usually doesn’t start until later in November to tie in with the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in America, Nakey is starting their sale promotion on November 12 by offering 20% off storewide until December 2. 

“As a newer brand, we want to avoid getting lost in the noise of well-established brands,” Margaritis explains about their early-start strategy. 

 So what will Margaritis do next year for the sales period, when Nakey is no longer a nude newborn and instead a talking toddler? She’ll focus on continuing to build a strong email list, segmenting customers according to their specific needs, and engaging consistently with Nakey’s audience in the months — not just the weeks — leading up to BFCM. 

Doing so this year “would have allowed us to create more tailored promotions and [better] understand what our customers value most,” Margaritis says. 

Skoop Skincare

Hannah Milgate is no stranger to the global sales weekend, with a career spanning across a decade in the retail marketing industry. That experience “provided invaluable insights into the evolution of Black Friday”, the founder of Skoop Skincare tells SmartCompany. 

The skincare brand was founded in October 2023, so it has only just reached its very first birthday — and the team is not going to let that go by without a celebration during BFCM. 

Since day dot of Scoop, Milgate was planning for the Black Friday bonanza.  

BFCM is “more of a necessity than a desire” for small brands, as it “has the potential to make or break a brand’s year”, she says. 

“We don’t frequently hold sales [at Skoop], so our entire budget and opportunity are channeled into this one campaign. 

But as a small business, Skoop doesn’t have the opportunity to offer “steep discounts like the big players”, and “matching their massive marketing budgets during the campaign is a whole other challenge”. 

So how will Skoop stand out against the crowd, especially in an age where social media marketing is changing so rapidly thanks to the tech billionaires at the helm of it all? 

Simple: focusing on encouraging Skoop customers to sign up to the brand’s owned channels — its emailing list, predominately — and providing a 30% discount off the entire range plus spend and save offers to all Skoop subscribers between November 27 and December 2, 2024. 

Atkins Lab

Atkins has been around for many BFCM sales periods considering the business was founded nearly an entire century ago in 1936. 

The family business is now in its third generation of ownership, and while it has developed its offerings alongside the developments in photography over the decades, the current owner Paul Atkins remains steadfast in the fact that Atkins Photo Lab “does not believe in sales, specials or discounts”. 

“We took our lead from the book How Brands Grow by Professor Byron Sharp,” he explains. 

“Sales such as Black Friday just train your clients to wait. They create frustration and distrust that the client paid one price one day and significantly less the next. It also creates sticker shock when they see your everyday price as much higher. 

“Buyers may also assume you still make money at the discounted rate, so you must really be ripping them off,” Atkins says, but he does acknowledge that his business is very different to the other brands currently running their Black Friday promotions. 

“We custom make each order, so a sudden influx of discounted work [would be] disruptive and costly,” he says. 

“We think the real challenge is to engage your customers around the product and not the price. 

“We don’t want to be a utility with a price tag, we want to be something desired.”

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