Christmas Retail Strategy: Why August Decides December

The first place that I would suggest that you start is with last Christmas.

In my membership group, Resilient Retail Club, we do this exercise every January.

If you didn't do it yourself in January, this is a great time to do it now, and that is to sit down and look at what actually happened in Christmas 2025.

In the big retail businesses that I've worked in, we always used to do this exercise.

It was called Lessons Learned and Strategy.

We would do it as soon as everyone was back after their Christmas break, and we would use it to build the basis of the following year's Christmas strategy.

And it's really, really beneficial because your sales data tells you so much more than your memory.

You may think to yourself, "Actually, I think everything was fine last Christmas," but it's well worth sitting down, going through the data, and really going through notes, information that you have, and looking at what it was actually like day to day in the run-up to Christmas last year.

We maybe have blocked out some of the most stressful bits, so we wanna make sure that we're not working ourselves up over what's gonna happen this year, but we're keeping our eyes open and we're putting together a really solid plan.

What I suggest that you do is you take some time, maybe half an hour or an hour, and you sit down and go back over last Christmas.

If you've done this exercise, you can be smug right now, and you can just go pull it out of the archive that you've put it in and look through this information to refresh your memory.

But if you haven't done this exercise already, then here's where I recommend that you start.

I want you to go through everything that you sold last year in terms of your best sellers.

So what were the products that generated most of your sales for you throughout the Christmas period? You may find it useful to break this down between October, November, and December, or you may just find it easier to look at the entire fourth quarter in one go.

But make sure you go through and you look at what actually was driving the sales and how many did you sell of them? How much cash were they taking? What percentage of your Christmas sales came from your best sellers? Work out if you looked at the products that were generating 80% of your sales over Christmas, what were they? Make sure you've got that really clear in your mind.

Also ask yourself, were there any products that surprised you? Things that you had picked up that you thought for sure were going to fly off the shelves, which did not.

And equally, things that you maybe were a little bit timid on that really sold out quickly.

You wanna make sure that you really delve into those slow sellers to not only just understand what happened, but also why it happened.

Why do you think it didn't work? Was it just that you picked the wrong one and it was a good idea, you just need to look for a different supplier this year? Was it that the price point wasn't right? Did you get the wrong color? What was it about this item that people didn't like? Not, again, to beat yourself up about, but just so that you can really understand and make sure you don't make the same mistake again.

And in terms of the sellouts, looking at those, what worked really, really well? What did you not have enough of? What do you wish that you could have bought twice or three times as many of? And again, why? Why were they so good? What was it that people really responded to? Do you think that's still relevant this year? Was it just a trend item that n- nobody's gonna be interested in this year, or is it something that your customer just really loves? You also want to have a think about what did you do in terms of your marketing last year.

Just be honest with yourself.

Were you happy with how it went? What could you have done more of? What could you have done less of? And what were the marketing campaigns that drove sales? What were the activities that you did which were really worthwhile, and what were the ones that you could actually probably leave? If you did in-store events, did they work really well for you? If you reached out to your best customers, did that work? Or were there things that you did that were a huge amount of effort and maybe nice for a couple of posts on social media, but you don't think they're gonna be needed this year? Ask yourself, "If someone asked me my top 10 Christmas products, could I answer? If somebody asked me what the three things were that I did in my marketing last Christmas that really drove results, could I answer?" Spend a bit of time with your data.

Spend a bit of time with your notes.

Spend a bit of time looking back.

You know, scroll back through your Instagram account.