80% of Black Friday purchases end up in landfill or are incinerated after one or zero uses. It’s not just the environment that's affected. Big discounts encourage one-time purchases over brand loyalty and train customers to wait for the next sale. It’s more sustainable for our planet as well as your brand to do something different.
The origin of Black Friday deals
It's become a big deal full of big deals. A lot of online businesses get excited about it because, on average, you can see three times the amount of traffic compared to a normal festive day
-- Sales on Black Friday for some stores can be five times higher than a normal festive day.
With such a big potential for sales, we might be asking 'are Black Friday deals worth it?'. When we scratch the surface, we find that it's a specific kind of customer that's driving these sales. And specifically it's people looking for discounts. For bargain hunters looking to buy cheap products, the data shows that Black Friday is a day where people are looking to buy mainly consumer electronics from major brands and knock down prices for themselves.
Black Friday sales are starting to look less of a good fit for independent brands with sustainable supply chains. And that's not surprising if we think about the origins of Black Friday. It's been driven by large businesses to drive sales. Maybe that's because they don't really have anything better to say, or offer, than a discount. Whatever your views, the public are starting to become more aware that the race to the bottom and the tendency to encourage overconsumption on Black Friday has a price that's being paid by the environment.
So do we at Restore Cph join this idea of 'doing sales', or do we do something different? Let's start with what would happen if we join the Black Friday frenzy and offer large sales.
Sales are actually counter-intuitive. They reduce our income and train people to wait for the next sale. When someone buys during a sale, they have no incentive to come back until you do another one.
Customers acquired when you discount your products are 50% less likely to shop with you again.
Alternatives to the sales storm
So what can we do instead? We could boycott it, but our view is that if we want to do something more positive, let's take some of that traffic and offer an alternative.
As everyone has come to understand, the most sustainable t-shirt is the one you already own or the one you find in a vintage store.
That's why we say Green is the new black and why we are dropping a huge amount of rare and amazing t-shirts on Green Friday