Black Friday boost: the brands leveraging the big sales for global growth
Two Australian brands previously took great advantage of one of the year’s biggest retail events to get noticed on the world stage.
Can a massive retail event really put your name out there amid all of the competition?
For the 2024 Paris Olympics luggage supplier July Luggage and Forbes 30 Under 30 Listers Lash Therapy Australia, the proof is in the pudding.
July Luggage
When SmartCompany first sat down with July Luggage co-founders Richard Li and Athan Didaskalou in 2022, it was in the kitchen/meeting pace of their Collingwood office, which was more of a warehouse-showroom-shopfront hybrid than a traditional office space.
At the time, the founders lightheartedly said that “the aim is to see at least 10 July products every time they’re in an airport, and if they didn’t, they hadn’t sold enough”.
Later that year they were named as the official luggage suppliers for the 2022 Australian Commonwealth Games, and now — a mere two years later — July has grown into a globally recognised brand with stores based in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore.
So how did July go from the backstreets of an inner-city suburb in Melbourne to the global stage — quite literally at the 2024 Paris Olympics — and did these global sale events help?
Speaking with SmartCompany this week, Li acknowledges that global sales periods such as Black Friday do help to put small Aussie brands on the world map. But when he looks back at their first ever Black Friday, he wishes he could tell himself “not to get too caught up in the discount game”.
After all, every man and his dog is running a sale during BFCM, but “what we’ve learned is that customers are looking for real value, not just the deepest discounts. We found that offering something special — whether it’s a thoughtful bundle or a limited edition product — actually drove more excitement than just marking down prices,” Li says.
Li’s advice for other small Australian businesses? The crucial lesson is inventory planning and getting the stock levels right.
“Running out of stock during BFCM is obviously painful — you disappoint customers and miss out on sales momentum. But over-ordering can be just as damaging to a growing business,” he says.
“We learned to look carefully at our regular sales patterns, factor in a realistic BFCM uplift, and add a modest buffer.
“It’s about finding that sweet spot between being prepared and being practical.”
Lash Therapy Australia
Lash Therapy Australia is an e-commerce online beauty store, so international customers have always been on the books — but sales like BFCM have brought in significant revenue growth for the four-year old business.
Speaking to SmartCompany, co-founder Jessica Arthur says that while Lash Australia’s main customer base comes directly from their website, they are also stocked on Amazon in the US and Costco in Australia.
“Our international orders are made up mostly of US [customers], being around 30%,” Arthur says.
Considering that the Black Friday sales tradition initiated in the US, the correlation makes sense.
“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are always one of our busiest times for traffic and sales,” Arthur says, as Lash Therapy starts its fourth BFCM since the business was founded in 2020.
“In other years we have experienced multiple sales a minute and done some of our biggest ever days in revenue,” Arthur says, and for this year’s sales, the team are “expecting even higher than average order values” compared to previous years.
It’s not an ambitious prediction, either. The co-founders were just listed on the inaugural Forbes Australia 30 under 30 list with a total revenue of $20 million after the three co-founded initially invested only $4000 upon launching the site.
According to Forbes Australia, Lash Therapy has already had a 248% increase in revenue from FY22 to now in FY24.
With Lash Therapy’s Black Friday sales campaign — which offers up to 75% off sitewide to all customers automatically — running from November 22 to December 2, it looks like FY25 is already shaping up to be another very big year of growth.
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