287: How Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple Plan Their Holiday Season
Most creators plan Black Friday as one week. They pick the offer, pick the discount and count the emails between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and then October is quiet, December is empty and January starts from zero.
In this episode I walk through how Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple ran their holiday season last year and what a digital product business can borrow from each one. None of them focus on just Black Friday week. They plan the whole season, and Black Friday is one moment inside it.
In this episode
- How Sephora ran its biggest sale of the season for members only and finished it before Black Friday even started
- Why Target opened its October sale two days ahead of Amazon and Walmart and used it to sign people up for its paid membership
- How Starbucks turned one season into five reasons to pay attention without running a single discount
- What Amazon's made-up shopping holiday tells you about creating your own event in a slow month
- The HobbyScool Black Friday promo with no discount that got more clicks than our 50% and 40% off deals
- What a full holiday season looks like for a digital product business, from an October warmup through a January waitlist
Resources mentioned.
- Plan your whole holiday season with the 10-station Claude skill vault: Black Friday Profit Party
The Black Friday Profit Party plans your season with you from November 1st into the new year, with a menu of 62 campaign types, and it writes your emails, social posts and sales pages one campaign at a time. If you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included.
Get the Black Friday Profit Party →Episode transcript.
00:00Hey there, and welcome back to the Creator's MBA Show. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I'm super excited that you're joining me here today. I want to talk about Black Friday. It's right around the corner, and I know a lot of you are thinking about it. But I want to come at it from a different direction than what you normally hear this time of year.
When most business owners start thinking about Black Friday, they're thinking about just one week. They're going through their mind and saying, "What is my offer going to be? What's the discount? How many emails do I send between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday?" And then they build their whole Black Friday plan around those five days.
The problem is what happens around that week. October is quiet because you're busy building the offer, making tweaks there and building your funnel, so when the sales emails show up, your list hasn't heard much from you.
01:00And then after Cyber Monday you're tired, so December is empty, and then January starts from zero again.
So I went and looked at how five big retailers that everybody knows ran their holiday season last year, and I'm going to walk you through each one today. We're going to be talking about Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple. And what jumped out at me is that none of them focus on just the Black Friday week.
02:00They plan an entire season, and Black Friday is just one little moment inside of it.
I want to start with Sephora, because if you've read my blog series on campaigns, you know I talk about Sephora a lot. Sephora runs a big sale called the Savings Event, and it's only for members of their free loyalty program, Beauty Insider. Their top tier, Rouge, could start shopping on Friday, October 31st, and everybody else started on Tuesday, November 4th. And every tier had until November 10th to use the discount. So let's think about that for a second. Sephora's biggest sale of the holiday season was over before Black Friday even started.
03:00They didn't try to compete with every other store in the same week. They went early.
The discount also goes up with how much you spend. Members who spend $1,000 a year get 20% off. VIB members who spend $350 a year get 15% off, and the regular Insiders who join for free get 10% off. So the best customers get in first, and they also get the biggest perks.
There's one other piece that I really love about what they're doing. During that early access window, members could invite one friend to shop with their 20% off discount. So the sale also brings in new customers through the people who already love the brand.
04:00For a digital product business like ours, that's early access for your members and past buyers, a bigger bonus for your highest tier, and a way for your best people to bring a friend. And you can run it before the Black Friday crowd shows up in everyone's inbox.
The next retailer I want to talk about is Target. Target runs an event called Target Circle Week, and they ran it three times last year. There was one in July to catch back-to-school and college shopping. Then another one from October 5th through the 11th that covered fall clothes, Halloween and early holiday gifts. Now let's look at the timing on the October one. Target started October 5th, which was two days before Amazon's October sale and Walmart's fall event.
05:00Just like Sephora, they went early on purpose. And during Circle Week, Target has something called Deal of the Day. Every day they revealed three or more new deals starting at 40% off, so people had a reason to come back every single day of that week.
And here's the move I want you to pay attention to. Target has a free membership and a paid one called Circle 360, and during Circle Week, anyone who spent $199 or more got a free year of Circle 360. The sale itself was recruiting people into the paid membership. But Target didn't stop there.
06:00Starting November 1st, they rolled out hundreds of new deals every week along with the daily deals. So October was the warmup, and November kept going week after week all the way through the holidays. For us as digital product entrepreneurs, that could be a new bonus or a new template revealed each day of your promotion, so people have a reason to open every email.
Now let's talk about the next one. Starbucks is one of my favorites to talk about because Starbucks doesn't really run sales at all. What they run is a calendar. Here's what their holiday season looked like last year. The holiday lineup was announced on October 6th, about a month before any of it was available, so they did a preview. And then everything launched on November 6th,
07:00and Red Cup Day came a week later on November 13th. On Red Cup Day, anyone who bought a holiday drink got a free collectible reusable cup.
Then there was a second wave. A few weeks later, two more drinks came back on the menu, and one of them was the eggnog latte, which had been off the menu since 2021 until their fans campaigned to bring it back. And then there was the Bearista cup, which was a glass cup shaped like a bear. It sold out almost immediately. Starbucks put out a statement saying the demand was bigger than they expected and apologized to customers who missed it. And then they turned that into another moment.
08:00From December 8th to January 4th, they gave away more than 600 bear cups a day as prizes in their holiday game.
So count those up. There's the announcement, the launch, Red Cup Day, the second drop and then the game. That's five reasons to pay attention inside one season, and none of them have a discount. For a digital product business like ours, that means one campaign can have several different moments in it. You announce, you open, you have a special day, you bring something back, and you close with a game or a giveaway. And if people have been asking you to reopen something you've done in the past, like a workshop or a replay,
09:00that's a campaign too.
Now let's talk about one of the big ones out there, and that's Amazon, because Amazon did something I think every creator should hear about. Amazon runs two big member sales a year. The October one is called Prime Big Deal Days, and it's Amazon's way of kicking off the holiday season, so the deals lean toward gifts. So Amazon also starts the season in October, just like Sephora and Target.
But the bigger story is Prime Day in the summer. Prime Day didn't exist until Amazon made it up. They invented their own shopping holiday. In 2025 they doubled it from two days to four, and this year they moved it to June 23rd through the 26th
10:00so it wouldn't compete with the World Cup and the 4th of July. And the numbers are huge. Those four days brought in $26.4 billion in online spending across US retailers. Just to give you some comparison, shoppers spent $32.4 billion across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2025. So a holiday that Amazon made up is getting close to the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
And there's one more Amazon number I want you to hear. In 2025, 64% of Prime Day spending happened in the first two days of the four-day event. Honestly, I saw the same thing at HobbyScool.
11:00In the five-day Black Friday run I did last year, I had the most clicks in the first couple of days. Then we went all the way for five days, and on Cyber Monday everything came back. So people pay the most attention at the start, and then there's a little bump at the end when the deadline shows up. For you, that means two things. You can create your own event in a slow month and give it a name, so think about that. And you can pick your dates around your audience's calendar the way Amazon moved around the World Cup.
The last retailer I want to talk about is Apple. And Apple, my friend, is the one to study if you really don't want to cut your price. That's why it's one of my favorites.
12:00Apple doesn't slash prices for Black Friday. Instead, it gives an Apple gift card with certain products. Last year the event ran for four days, from Friday, November 28th through Monday, December 1st. And there are two details here I want you to pick up on. Number one, the gift card gets emailed after you buy, so you can't use it on that order. You can use it on your next purchase. And number two, the newest products, like the iPhone 17, weren't part of the promotion at all. So the newest things stay at full price, and the bonus brings you back to buy again.
Now, this one is really close to something we did at HobbyScool last year. For Black Friday 2025, we sold annual access to the Craft & Create
13:00Club at full price, which was $70, and we attached a $70 shop gift card. That email went out to over 37,000 people and got over 1,300 clicks, which was more than any other sale day we had, including the 50% off and the 40% off deals. So we had the most sales with that promotion, and it didn't have a discount on it. For your business, people could buy the membership and get a credit toward something else, like a VIP day or your next workshop. Your signature offer stays at full price, and the bonus points to the next thing they can buy from you.
So let's pull all of this together, because when you line these five up, the same pattern
14:00keeps showing up. All of them start in October, and I want you to keep that in mind. Sephora's sale was done before Black Friday. Target and Amazon both ran member events in early October to kick off the holidays. Starbucks announced its holiday lineup a month before anything was for sale.
Their members and their best customers get in first. Sephora gives its top tier early access. Target gives its paid members early access. And Amazon's big sales are only for Prime members.
They give people more than one reason to show up. Target has a new deal every day. Starbucks has five moments in one season, and Amazon adds new deals
15:00each day of Prime Day.
Most of them add something instead of cutting the price. Starbucks gives you a cup. Apple gives you a gift card. Sephora gives members a free gift with purchase.
And they keep going after Cyber Monday. According to Adobe, shoppers spent $257.8 billion online from November 1st through December 31st last year, in 2025. The five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday brought in $44.2 billion of that. That means most of the holiday money was spent outside of Black Friday week. The big retailers plan for that, and I want you to do that too.
16:00So what does it look like when a digital product business plans a season? It starts in October with something that warms up your list and brings new people in, like a free challenge, a workshop or a lead magnet push. That's your version of Circle Week or Prime Big Deal Days. Then late in October, you open an early access list so people can raise their hand to hear about your holiday offer first. That's the Sephora move.
Before Black Friday, you send a preview email that sells nothing and just shows people what's coming. That's the Starbucks announcement. When we did this at HobbyScool on November 23rd, 2025, that preview email went out to 39,457 people and got over 2,300 clicks, which was great exposure.
17:00People wanted to know what was happening. Then your past buyers get in a day or two early, Black Friday opens to everyone, and Cyber Monday is your last call. And then in December, I want you to keep going. That could be gift memberships, an annual plan push, or the next step for people who bought from you on Black Friday. It can even reach into January with a waitlist for whatever you're opening in the new year.
Every one of these moments points to the same signature offer. The way you talk about it changes, and the place it leads to stays the same.
If you want to plan your holiday season this way, that's what the Black Friday Profit Party is for. I've run it for three years now, and this year it's a self-paced program with a 10-station Claude skill vault that plans your
18:00entire holiday season with you, from November 1st all the way into the new year. The vault walks you through the same order the big retailers use. There's a menu of 62 campaign types to choose from, and before you build anything, it checks your plan against the hours you really have. After that, it builds the campaigns with you one at a time. It writes the emails with the subject lines and the send times, the social posts and the sales page. It also builds pages that switch over on their own when a deal opens and when it closes, so if you're running a daily deals week, you don't have to log in at midnight to change anything.
You can plan as much or as little as you want. Some people run something every week of the season, some run two or three big campaigns, and some just want to do one Black Friday campaign
19:00done well. You don't have to discount anything either. If you want to do a discount, the vault runs the math on your own numbers first so you can see what it costs you.
I'm going to put the link for the Black Friday Profit Party in the show notes. If you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included, so you don't need to buy it. Members of the Creator's MBA Mastermind also get a live coaching session with me on Wednesday, October 28th, where I'll walk you through my own plans for November and December and then do some hot seats. And Mastermind members can send me the plan they built by November 3rd so I can personally give them feedback.
Here's what I want you to take away from today. Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple all start in October.
20:00They let their best customers in first, they give people more than one reason to pay attention, and they keep selling after Cyber Monday. You can do every one of these things in your business, at your size, with the offers you already have. And if you want to build that plan with me, grab the Black Friday Profit Party, and I'll see you inside. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll chat next week.
Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day, and bye for now.
Pin this and save for later
