I personally never heard of Missoni but the fact that the activity was even close to comparable to the biggest shopping day of the year is pretty amazing. To add to the impressiveness of this launch is that their website wasn’t prepared for it either. The numbers visiting Target.com during the launch must have been through the roof, I mean it’s Target.com.

This reminds me of one of our former records sales day we had a few years ago at DetailedImage.com that completely caught us off guard on how successful the sale we ran was as our site temporarily went in and out of commission. I can see how that happened us as a small growing company but Target crashing for one new popular product line is shocking to me since I assume they would already be prepared for a holiday rush so the demand for Missoni must have been truly unprecedented.  Nonetheless I think the Missoni at Target partnership had a successful launch since they almost cleared out inventory in one day for a planned one month limited-time exclusive on the line.

This big holiday weekend all started back in August with our holiday marketing preparation and our kick off to holiday specials in
November. We were proactive this year and took advantage of some down time in the fall to plan out everything from inventory, marketing, work hours, etc. to result in a very successful and less stressful holiday weekend. Having a few holiday seasons under our belt, our experience and constant improvements on efficiency let us whoop some candy ass this Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend.

Execution, execution, execution, it’s all about execution right now as we near the final stretch with shipping deadlines looming. A few more sales and a focus on free shipping is how we’ll finish off the holiday season. Again experience has helped us plan everything out and it’s made this holiday season go swimmingly so far.

Home Shopping Network
First lets start with the Home Shopping Network (HSN) newsletter featuring 5 Reason To Shop HSN. It’s wonderfully designed and it makes some very valid points on why to shop with them. When the holidays roll around you have to stand out and make every effort to provide as much value as possible to customers. Customers want value during the holidays and HSN lets you know exactly why you should shop with them.

Sports Authority
Sports Authority ran a great Black Friday Pre-Sale providing great value to themselves and customers. I like this promo because it’s something unique that I haven’t seen and here are a few reasons why it works.

• They’re getting Black Friday deals out to customers early and getting them excited
• They’re making it easy for customers to get big ticket Black Friday items by allowing them to pre-order
• Even though these are pre-orders they’re still getting customers in the store on Black Friday for the pick up
• If there is a deposit on the pre-orders Sports Authority is getting money in their pocket earlier which can help cash flow

It’s simple Sports Authority is making it easy for customers to take advantage Black Friday early and if they do require a deposit they’re creating better cash flow for themselves.

The wheels are in motion and it’s come down to execution. We’re very well prepared going into to this year’s holiday season and look forward to a successful one. There’s excitement in the air as November starts and I’m looking forward to see how some of the new things we’re doing work out.

Holiday marketing already? Yeah I know right, we actually finalized our marketing plan for the rest of the year for Detailed Image at the end of August a few weeks ago.  Doesn’t everyone love talking about the holidays when it’s still summer? Not really but it’s worth it to prepare early for a busy holiday season as a retailer.

In the early years of Detailed Image we didn’t know how big selling detailing supplies would be during the holidays but it turns out that we are able capitalize off of it and it’s become one our busiest times of the year.

Things to think about this holiday season:

• Emergence of Cyber Sunday
• Change in the email landscape including Gmail’s Priority Inbox and Hotmail’s time traveling filters, sweep and preference auto-learning
• Slow growth economy, consumer confidence & unemployment rates
• When to start your holiday marketing push
• The thin line between too many emails and too little emails

There hasn’t been to many major trends comings from last year’s holiday season as far as marketing goes but the little things I mentioned above can come into play with your marketing. Key things still include many of the things I wrote about back in 2008.

August is about that time we start preparing for the holidays and it’s exciting for us to see what we can do to beat what we did last year. We want to do better and I think we have a great plan going forward.

An early, early, early happy holidays to everyone.

This Super Bowl weekend we got something fun in the works at Detailed Image.  We’re doing a Super Bowl free shipping promo with a special bonus for free products. The special bonus is if you pick the winner of the Super Bowl between the Colts and Saints you’ll automatically receive a free 8oz Optimum No Rinse and Microfiber All Purpose Towel.

This is another example of the creative promotions we can do at Pure Adapt. Last April we did this cool little Easter egg promotion where eligible orders received a random plastic egg with a gift certificate in it.

It’s exciting when we really get to be creative with our marketing.  We try to keep it fresh so that our promotions don’t get mundane and over done.  We’ve done a great job in my opinion in keeping things pretty flexible so that we can do promotions like this.  When I’m planning out our marketing promotions I can see it getting repetitive and it’s nice when you get something new out there for our customers.

The thing I like best about his promotion is how the customer gets involved in the promo for a chance to get some free products.

Here are the complete details to our Super Bowl XLIV promotion:

Super Bowl Free Shipping
Coupon Code:  superbowl44
Bonus - Pick the winner of the Super Bowl and get a free 8oz Optimum No Rinse (ONR) and 1 DI Microfiber All Purpose Towel. Enter your Super Bowl pick in the comment field as “Colts” or “Saints”.

Minimum purchase $75 is required for free shipping and bonus. You must place a valid order using coupon code superbowl44 to make your pick eligible for free products. This offer cannot be combined with any other offers. Free shipping is only valid to 48 contiguous US states. Offer ends Sunday, February 7, 2010 6:00 PM EST.

I’m looking forward to a great Super Sunday, can’t wait.

Earlier this month I already noticed companies getting into the holiday spirit through newsletters and mailings. I recently reviewed our holiday marketing plan and tactics at the end of October and was surprised that it’s been a full 2 months since I put the plan together because I wrote “Happy Holidays in August” at the end of it. Time has passed with the swiftness and it’s time for implementation.

We have already started some of our holiday promotions with free ground shipping for US orders over $150 at Detailed Image. I designed a nice little header for our holiday free shipping promo (see below). This is a nice subtle way to transition into the holidays and feature our shipping promo.

We really kick things off today when we start our “Shop Early and Save Big” event. The primary goal of this sale is to get the customer shopping for the holidays a little bit early.

Competition starts to heat up with sales everywhere and inbox real estate is ever so more important as Thanksgiving nears.  We’re ready to get this holiday party started. I think we have a great plan heading forward and can’t wait to implement everything. As December comes near I’m also very excited to implement a little more festivity into the site design.

If you detail or are interested in detailing please take advantage of our Big Sale. Today through the 11/16/2009 11:59 PM EST save 20% at DetailedImage.com with coupon code EARLY09 and receive free shipping on orders over $150 (some restrictions apply).

Happy Pre-Holidays!

One awesome thing, among many others, of being part of a 4 person company of owners is that we get to come up with some very cool promotions and really get creative.  On a regular basis my partners and I get together to brainstorm and plan out our upcoming promotions.  For the month of April we came up with a cool and unique Easter egg promotion for Detailed Image that just started today.

From today through April 14, 2009 every order at DetailedImage.com over $75 will receive a random Easter egg with a gift certificate inside.  Gift certificate values in the eggs will be either $10, $25, or $100.  In this promotion we’re providing value for ordering with us and a little excitement.  Take in the excitement of opening an Easter egg for a chance to get a free $100 gift certificate.

That’s just one of the creative promotions that we’ve ran so far at Detailed Image.  In the past we’ve also done color sales based on the holiday like our black and orange sale for Halloween and a numbers play like our 2009 $20.09 credit promotion.

I love the fact that we can get creative here at Pure Adapt. I think we have built the company in a way that we are flexible enough try new things out and change on a dime as need be.  As we continue to grow I look forward to working on bringing more creative promotions to our customers because we can and it’s fun as hell.

Earlier this week I read about an unusual promotional product for the upcoming movie.  It was a matchbook that had a blue condom in it with the quote “We’re Society’s Only Protection“.  Get it, get it… that’s an awesome promotional product.  I first saw this on WatchmenComicMovie.com.

You can be just like Dr. Manhattan in color, at least in one area.

I personally think this is a great marketing ploy and I would love to get my hands on one.  Whether you like it or not, something controversial like this will usually get some buzz.  From a marketing standpoint I think it gets the job done creating a buzz from lovers and haters.

The excitement for the movie is building and I’m looking forward to seeing this graphic novel on the big screen.

The Watchmen are watching over us in bed.