The retailers who have a brilliant Christmas are not the ones working hardest in December.

Hi, I'm retail strategist and founder of Resilient Retail Club, Catherine Erdly.

It is the middle of August, and I know that for a lot of you the word "Christmas" right now produces a small internal flinch. But here is the uncomfortable thing about peak season: by the time December arrives, almost every decision that will determine how it goes has already been made. The buying, the sales plan, the staffing, the storage, the marketing calendar. Every one of those is a retail management decision, and every one of them gets made weeks or months earlier, usually in a rush and usually on instinct. The effort you pour in during December is real, but it is spent inside a retail strategy you built in August whether you meant to or not.

In this episode, the first of four I am running across the next month on getting ready for Christmas, I want to talk about where you actually start. Not with this Christmas, but with last one. There is an exercise that every large retail business I have worked in runs religiously, and that almost nobody in indie retail ever does. It takes about half an hour, it uses data you already have, and it will tell you things your memory absolutely will not, because we are all very good at quietly editing out the worst bits of the last peak season. I will walk you through the questions it should answer: which products were really carrying your Christmas, what surprised you, what you were too timid on, and which bits of your small shop marketing genuinely earned their keep and brought you repeat customers.

Then I want to talk about the two things that turn that review into a plan: choosing one clear goal for this Christmas instead of trying to fix everything at once, and being honest about whether your business can physically cope with the Christmas you are hoping for. That second one matters most if you are scaling a retail business, because retail business growth is wonderful right up until the week you cannot fulfil it. Demand you cannot fill is expensive and stressful, and it is far easier to see coming in August than in the last week of November.

By the end of this episode you will know exactly what to sit down with, what to look for, and what to have decided before the next one, where we get into the cash flow to fund it all. Press play, then go and grab the free planner.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Why a great Christmas is decided in August

01:12 The Lessons Learned exercise big retailers never skip

05:37 Choosing your one Christmas goal

07:18 Capacity planning: can your business actually cope?

LINKS

Get Set for Christmas planner (free): https://www.resilientretailclub.com/christmas

All episodes: https://www.resilientretailclub.com/podcast/

Catherine on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/catherineerdly

Mentioned in this episode:

Capify

Home and Gift Association is our sponsor this month

https://www.homeandgiftassociation.org.uk/

Christmas selling doesn't start in November, it starts now.

Before we get into this episode, I want to let you know there is

a free resource, which is your Get Set for Christmas planner. You can head

over to resilientretailclub.com/christmas and download it today.

Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan.

I'm Catherine Erdly, and this podcast is here to share retail industry trends,

insights, and best practices for you, the retailer who's serious about building

something that lasts.

The retailers who have a great Christmas aren't necessarily the ones

who work the hardest in December.

They're the ones who make better decisions.

In August, September, October, November, and December.

Today we're going to talk about how to lay the foundations.

This is number one in a series of four podcast episodes that I'm gonna be

talking to you about over the next month, all about getting ready for Christmas.

And what I want to talk to you about today is how you even start the process.

Let's assume you haven't done so already, because after all, we are in the middle

of August, but I really want to stress the importance of getting ready early.

You may be planning to visit shows in September, and you definitely want to

have done some prep work before that so you know what's on your shopping list.

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 are 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 colour?

Well, 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 nobody's gonna be interested in this year?

Or was 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, to 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.

What were you posting on there?

Look in your email marketing software.

What did you actually send out over Christmas last year?

Just really re-familiarise yourself with what you did and what you were

happy with and what you would change.

Once you've done that exercise, it will really start shifting everything into

focus to help you understand what it is that you need to do in Christmas 2026.

You don't want to try and improve everything all at once.

You need to pick one goal.

What, what do you want to really aim for this Christmas?

And it's totally up to you what that goal is.

It could be a sales number.

You could say to yourself, I really want to hit X amount of

money in the fourth quarter.

It could be that you really want to push your average transaction

value and really aim to grow that.

That's also another great stat for you to check from last year to really understand

what your average transaction value was.

Maybe it's not about sales, maybe based on, as we talked about in last

week's episode, it's not about turnover, it's about profits.

So maybe you want to make sure that you're more profitable.

Maybe you want to sell through old stock.

Maybe you realise you've got a few boxes of Christmas stuff that you

just really need to get out there.

Maybe you just want January to be a little bit cleaner in terms of not having

so much stock left over in January.

You could have a lot of different elements in terms of what you

actually want to achieve, but make sure you are clear on it.

You might also just want to get through the months of October, November, and

December without succumbing to the flu at the end of it, because you're so

exhausted and burnt out and you can't even enjoy the Christmas season because

you just have had so much going on.

So everything that you do then from this point, should support that goal.

The other thing that I would say is really helpful is if you actually set yourself

those sales goals, it means that you can have a think about your capacity planning,

The other thing that I would say is really helpful is if you actually set

yourself those sales goals, it means that you can have a think about your capacity

planning, because Christmas isn't just about hitting a particular sales number.

It is about can your business actually cope?

Again, so many people run themselves into the ground during the fourth

quarter and they just have to start the new year by saying, I

just can't go through that again.

I want it to be better this time.

So if you are actually planning at this point and looking in the middle of August

at what you're expecting to sell all the way through October, November, December,

this is particularly important by the way.

If your business has been growing and you are on a growth trajectory, you wanna

make sure, well, what's that actually going to look like this Christmas?

What numbers do I think I'm gonna be taking and can I cope with it?

So if you've been trading all year up 50%, likelihood is that may well continue

into the fourth quarter, and are you ready and prepared to be 50% up on the year?

You need to look through and have an idea of your staffing.

Do you have enough people to physically serve these customers

or send out these orders?

Do you have enough supplies?

Do you have enough packaging, enough bags, enough wrapping?

Do you feel like your website is equipped to hold this amount of traffic?

Do you feel like you've got some holiday cover?

Because we all know that when one person on the team gets sick, it's like

everyone gets sick at the same time.

So do you have anybody who you could train up to be a floating extra pair of hands?

This is a great time of year to be looking for that person.

Are you really clear on how much you're gonna be needing to buy?

What does your cash flow look like?

We're gonna talk about that more next week.

But these are all things that you can start thinking about once

you start with a sales plan, an actual sales plan for Christmas.

Do you have enough storage space?

Do you have enough room to actually store all of the stock that you're going

to need in order to do these sales?

So demand is great.

Sales are great.

It's all really important to grow that top line, but demand that you

can't fill is expensive and stressful.

So it is well worth getting clear on that right now.

So before the next episode where we're gonna be talking more about the

cash flow pinch, this is what I would love for you to do, take a few moments

to review last Christmas, go over all of the key elements that we talked

about, understand what your sales were, also, what your sales pattern was.

Because for example, a lot of people see we talk about Christmas, but really it's

gonna be after Black Friday, that last week of November into Christmas

that people really see their sales spike.

So you wanna get clear on that so you're not stressing out in October,

if sales are always typically low in that month. Make sure you set yourself

one really clear Christmas goal, whether that's turnover related or

whether that is to do with how you want the Christmas season to feel.

Make sure that you set some sales, clear sales goals as well so that you can

actually put together a plan and identify any bottlenecks that you can foresee.

Do you have the capacity, the space, the products, the supplies, and

the people to actually achieve what you want to achieve at Christmas?

So now we've decided where you're heading.

We are gonna be talking in the next episode about making sure that you've

got the cash flow to get you there.

And as I said at the beginning of this episode, if you head to

resilientretailclub.com/christmas, you can get your hands on your free

downloadable planner that will help you have the best Christmas yet in 2026.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.