What's the real deal on Black Friday?

Well, here we are again. It's the week of Black Friday in 2024 - so where are we at with the whole "stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" thang?!

Overconsumption (and it's close cousin, waste) is becoming the real crunch issue of our time isn't it? For quite a while we've known that the volumes of product we are making and consuming - whether that's clothes, electronics, plastics - is the true heart of our problem. There has been an SDG on it for years but it was always just too hard to even think about dealing with. But now, well there's a bit of a zeitgeist isn't there, just a bit. We are beginning to wince at it all.

Let's dig into the reality of big biz versus small biz on Black Friday. This is where the David and Goliath metaphor just doesn't fly. For small and sustainable businesses the maths just doesn't stack up. 

When you are a big retailer you make at the lowest cost possible, sell as high as you dare and drag in as much margin as possible. Rock bottom wages, punishing procurement contracts, cheap fabric - you get the picture. When you are a small sustainable business it's all reversed. You find the best fabric made of quality fibres, you pay good wages, you juggle the margin to find the sweet spot where the customer buys but the quality remains and there's enough in the gap to make it worth it. 

So Black Friday price drops are actually pretty dangerous for the longevity of the business. Because the juggle that was the process of finding the sweet spot has become a tight rope over a canyon where you could take a wrong step and through the whole year plummeting to the dark ravine below. Sounds dramatic? Not really, that's the reality of small sustainable business in 2024. 

If you can, support small this year. If you are on the tight rope too, for whatever reason and whatever walk of life you are in - maybe just like a post, or drop a heart on the comments section. Then the wobbly tight rope isn't quite so worrying.

And if you are a small, sustainable business, know this: you are not alone. Together (the translation of Comhla) is how we move forward. Drop me an email if you want to say hi and share your experiences. 2025 is going to be our year!