Get Your Redbubble Shop Ready for Black Friday
We know you haven’t even tasted your first pumpkin spice latte, and your winter coat is still in the closet, but it’s six weeks ’til Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year, and the official start of the holiday sales period. That means it’s high time you got your holiday plans in order.
Before you dive into making plans, we’ve put together a list of questions to help you review your shop and make some decisions about where you want to focus your efforts. This should help you refine some goals for the holiday season.
Designs by kirbeekatz, Katy Bloss, and Show Me Mars
14 Questions to Help you Plan for Holidays
Start with a ‘stocktake’ to help you figure out what’s working and what you’d like to achieve. You can find the answers to some of these questions on your Artist Dashboard. You’ll probably need to consider putting aside time for creating new designs, uploading and getting your shop into shape, and planning how you’re going to promote your shop.
Let’s start by thinking about new designs:
- Which designs were your top sellers this year?
- Which were your top selling products?
- Which designs had the highest engagement on social?
- Which were your personal faves (and why)?
- What do you feel is missing from your shop?
- Is there anything you’d like to try for holidays?
e.g. A new seasonal pattern range, learning a new technique, some licensed fan art - Would you like to create new products for holidays?
- How much time do you have to create new designs in the next 6 weeks?
Next up, some questions to help you figure out how much time you’ll need to spend updating your shop:
- Are you happy with your product selection?
- Would you like to enable more products?
- Have you enabled our newest products?
- Have you set up a thank you to buyers?
- Are your payment details up to date?
- Have you reviewed your tags recently?
Designs by jsongdesign, Teo Zirinis, and Charlotte Winter
Setting Goals
Once you’ve worked through these questions, you should start to get an idea of some of your goals. Try and make these as specific as possible. Here are some examples:
- Add 5 – 10 new t-shirt designs to my shop before Black Friday
- Create 5 new Christmas patterned Socks
- Create a new Greeting Card range of between 5 – 10 designs
- Add my existing designs to the new Home Decor products including Comforters, Throw Blankets, Shower Curtains and Bath Mats
- Add my latest series of Fall and Winter themed landscape photography
- Create some Fan Art designs for the new Rick and Morty season
- Make some animal themed stickers
Create a Calendar
The next step is working out how you want to split your time over the next six weeks. You may want to draw up a calendar like the one below, with a rough idea of what you’ll focus on each week. Keep in mind that once you’ve created new designs, you’ll need some time to add them to your shop. And it’s a good idea to start to marketing your work and sharing on social a few weeks before Black Friday, if it’s not something you’re already doing regularly.
That’s a good start for now, and enough to get you thinking about your first steps. Over the next 6 weeks we’ll be sharing more tips on how to prepare your Redbubble shop for a successful holiday season. We’ll cover:
- Making new designs and adding new products
- Trending themes and popular products for holidays
- Getting your shop ready
- How to share your work and successfully market your products
If you want to keep up to date with the latest tips and advice, follow us on the @redbubbleartists Instagram and make sure you’re signed up for artist emails. You can also check back here on the blog for regular updates. And if you have any tips on how you go about planning for holidays, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.