Running a Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale alongside your show weekends

Thanksgiving lands on November 26 this year, which means Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30 — three of the biggest online shopping days of the year, stacked in the middle of the busiest run of Markets and Festivals most vendors work all season. If you sell online as well as in person, that overlap raises a real scheduling question: how do you run a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale without it colliding with a booth weekend, or without one effort quietly undercutting the other.

Why this collision is worth planning for now

A lot of vendors treat Black Friday and Cyber Monday as something that happens to their online shop, separate from whatever Show is on the calendar that weekend. In practice the two compete for the same hours, the same inventory, and the same attention. A booth that needs you present from setup to teardown doesn't leave much room to also be answering online order questions in real time, and a flash sale that moves more inventory than expected can leave a booth thinner than planned the very next morning.

Deciding now — weeks before the weekend arrives — means you're choosing how the two fit together instead of reacting to whichever one gets busier first.

Decide what the sale actually is before you decide the discount

Big-box retailers built Black Friday around steep, short-term price cuts on high volume. That model doesn't map cleanly onto handmade work, where margins are already built around real labor and material cost rather than bulk manufacturing. A straight deep discount can move product fast and still leave you worse off once the true cost of making each piece is counted.

A few alternatives tend to fit a small maker's math better than a blanket percentage off:

• A bundle or multi-item deal — buy two, get a smaller add-on free, or a set price for a few pieces together — moves volume without cutting the price of any single item as deeply.
• A limited-run or holiday-only piece released specifically for the weekend gives shoppers a reason to buy now without discounting your regular lineup at all.
• Early access to new holiday work, offered to your email list or followers a day ahead of the general public, rewards your most engaged customers without touching price.
• Free shipping for the weekend, if your margins can absorb it, often moves as many fence-sitters as a percentage discount would.

Whichever shape it takes, decide the terms and the exact start and end times before the week arrives, and write them down somewhere you can post consistently across your shop and your social channels.

If you have a booth that same weekend

Black Friday weekend and the days around it are also prime Market and Festival dates, and plenty of vendors are literally staffing a tent while Cyber Monday is still a day away. If that's you, a few decisions are worth making in advance rather than mid-weekend:

• Schedule the sale to start and update itself, rather than something you have to flip on from a booth with patchy signal. Most online shop platforms let you schedule a sale and the posts announcing it ahead of time.
• Set a realistic response window for online orders and messages, and say so on your shop if it allows a note — "orders placed during the sale ship by [date]" is honest and keeps someone from expecting same-day packing from a vendor who's at a Festival all weekend.
• Decide whether the in-person price matches the online sale price. A customer who buys at full price at your booth Friday afternoon and then sees the same piece discounted online that evening is going to notice. Either run the same deal in both places for the weekend, or be clear that the online sale is a separate, limited promotion — but decide it before someone asks you directly.

If you don't have a booth that weekend

A free weekend gives you more room to put full attention into the online push — timed posts, an email send the morning of, maybe a short live sale on whatever platform your audience actually watches. It's also a good weekend to lean on a bundle or early-access angle rather than a pure discount, since you're not racing booth hours to manage it.

Know your real number before you decide how deep to go

Whatever the sale looks like, price it from your actual take-home, not your sticker price. For in-person selling, that's sales minus the booth fee, travel, and other expenses for that Event; for an online-only sale it's your sales minus material, shipping, and platform costs. A discount that looks generous on the product page but erases what you'd normally keep isn't worth running just to look busy over the weekend — know your floor before the sale goes live, not after the orders come in.

Pick one weekend, not every one

Black Friday and Cyber Monday don't have to be run as a single combined push, and plenty of makers do better running only one of the two rather than mirroring a retail calendar built for much bigger operations. If your audience responds more to a single clear event than three days of shifting messaging, a focused one-day sale beats a diluted long weekend every time.

Whatever you decide, keep it contained to that one weekend. The stacked run of holiday Shows ahead is the bigger opportunity, and a Black Friday push that blurs into a week-long sale tends to train customers to wait for the next markdown instead of buying at a fair price when they see your work.

Running a sale is easier to price with confidence when you already know what a normal weekend brings home. Artisans Almanac's Tracker keeps your booth fees, travel, and other costs next to each Event's sales so you can see your real take-home — start a 30-day free trial and know your numbers before you decide how deep to discount.