Our thoughts on Black Friday
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is an American sales day that was intended to reflect the official start of holiday shopping season. The phrase signified the day when retailers would turn a profit for the year and in turn go from being in the “red” to in the “black”. Since its arrival in the UK and subsequent popularity, Black Friday has gone from a single day to occupying a week’s worth of discounts and for some businesses an entire month *amazon* of sales. The craze of Black Friday has grown and grown - in 2019 alone 42% of adults in the UK said they intended to make use of the discounts.
Why is Black Friday considered unsustainable?
Why have we decided not to be a part of Black Friday?
We hope you'll see value in Leo's Box as a brand and business enough to continue shopping our products at our prices, even when some of the products drop for Black Friday. We believe in putting our money where our mouth is and supporting our suppliers in the same way. We're all in this together!
Black Friday is an American sales day that was intended to reflect the official start of holiday shopping season. The phrase signified the day when retailers would turn a profit for the year and in turn go from being in the “red” to in the “black”. Since its arrival in the UK and subsequent popularity, Black Friday has gone from a single day to occupying a week’s worth of discounts and for some businesses an entire month *amazon* of sales. The craze of Black Friday has grown and grown - in 2019 alone 42% of adults in the UK said they intended to make use of the discounts.
Why is Black Friday considered unsustainable?
- It encourages over-consumption
- It encourages cheap consumption - and someone in the production chain is often having to pay that cost
- Black Friday is frantic and frenzied. Pretty much the antithesis of the conscious, considered approach that we take here at Leo's Box.
- It is actually unprofitable for most businesses
- Black Friday usually hurts small independent businesses as they cannot compete with the larger firms due to their higher cost base
- More shopping, means more transport, packaging, emissions etc.
Why have we decided not to be a part of Black Friday?
- Although we want living sustainably to be as accessible as possible, we don't believe that offering a heavy discount just for a weekend is the right way to go about doing this. Instead, we prefer to offer a more transparent price for our products in line with our values and supporting our sustainable suppliers. We want them to do well and selling products as loss-leaders is never going to achieve this.
- Our products are our heart and soul and we can't knowingly sell these fantastic products that undervalues what we believe is fantastic quality and it is because of this high levels of quality that we aren't able to drop the price by 80 or 90% as these products are priced sensitively.
- We take a big hit on our margins in order to offer our products at an affordable price. These savings might seem small in comparison to large brands on Black Friday, but the deals year round are considerably better! And as we scale up, the savings will get bigger too. We aren't able to take a further hit on price without pushing us into a loss, which we couldn't survive long as a business.
We hope you'll see value in Leo's Box as a brand and business enough to continue shopping our products at our prices, even when some of the products drop for Black Friday. We believe in putting our money where our mouth is and supporting our suppliers in the same way. We're all in this together!
17 Feb 2022