REVEALING Black Friday Secrets To Use In Your Business (feat. Shopify's President)

Why does it matter? Because $3.5M per minute in sales data reveals what separates the brands that own Black Friday from the ones that just participate in it.

Shopify's president Harley sits on the real-time pulse of millions of stores worldwide — he knows who's winning, by how much, and exactly what they're doing differently. This conversation pulls back the curtain on tactics most businesses never consider, including one that took 18 months to show any return before it exploded.

• Gymshark's 12-week popup wasn't about foot traffic — it was a pretest to identify winning products before competition even started campaigning
• BarkBox turned a discount mechanic into a data harvesting engine worth multiples of the margin they gave up
• New Balance flipped their entire ad budget, saw nothing for 18 months, then took off like a rocket — most businesses quit at month 12
• The brands Macy's and Best Buy fear most aren't each other — they're two people in a garage who don't care which channel you buy from

Gymshark's 12-week popup was a data operation disguised as a retail experience

Three months of live sales data before your peak sales window is a competitive weapon no one else can buy. Harley's read on Gymshark's New York City holiday popup: "I believe they figured out very quickly what was going to be the hottest items for the action season so they pretested. The fact that they were able to get in on October 1st — they knew what was going to sell at the end of November. No one else was able to do that."

The popup started before competition began campaigning and ended after they stopped. That's not a branding play — that's three months of live consumer behavior telling you exactly which products to stack your Black Friday site with. No guesswork, no wasted promo budget on slow movers.

The same logic applies at any scale. Hormozi runs 450 pieces of content a week specifically because the winners aren't predetermined: "We only make one or two Longs and the Longs do really well — but it's because we have 438 shots on goal." You don't predict the winner. You run enough volume early to identify it, then put everything behind what the data already told you.

When Gymshark stripped their Black Friday site down to three nav items — women's sale, men's sale, accessories sale — that wasn't minimal design. That was the jam study in action. Twenty-four options lose to six. Walk your customer straight to the products you already know they want to buy.

New Balance saw zero ROI for 18 months — then the business took off like a rocket

The CMO of New Balance walked in and told his team to flip the budget: from 70% direct-response and 30% brand storytelling to the exact reverse. For 18 months, nothing happened. "And then at month 19 it just started taking off like a rocket."

That's New Balance — a brand people already know — with a massive media budget, and it still took a year and a half for brand investment to compound. For smaller operators with less capital and more skeptical boards, the pressure to abandon the strategy before month 19 is overwhelming. Most do.

Harley's framing is direct: "The stuff that's happening outside of this is the stuff that really dictates how well this is going to go. How much give has happened prior to this ask is almost directly proportional to the amount of sales that they're generating."

Butcher Box ran free cooking classes through an acquired company called Truffle Shuffle — beautiful production, no call to action, no sales pitch. Just value, delivered in an insane way. "The best companies — you don't know that you're being sold to. People want to buy. They don't want to be sold." The subscription offer came later, after the relationship was already built. That patience is what most brands can't hold.

BarkBox turned a discount into a data asset — same margin cost, far more customer value

Rather than hand over a coupon code, BarkBox built a pet quiz to earn the discount. Complete the challenge, get the deal. The mechanics: gamification creates engagement, the quiz creates data. "One of the quiz questions was name of your pet, tell me about the age of your pet — now you actually have a wonderful database" for hyper-personalized remarketing.

As Hormozi put it: "Most people don't want to give information for free. But if I can give you information in return for that information, you're going to give me a discount." The customer feels like they earned something. The brand walks away knowing the pet's name, breed, and age — and can now market Happy Birthday to Luna's dog every year.

A passive coupon and a quiz-based coupon cost identical margin. The quiz delivers conversion lift plus a remarketing asset you'll use for years. There's no version of this that doesn't win.

The same principle shows up across every brand in this conversation. Acquisition.com ran a scaling roadmap on the same morning — customers had to fill out detailed business information to unlock it. Information exchanged for value. Data captured on the way in. Every touch point is either collecting signal or wasting it.

A startup nobody heard of became TikTok Shop's #1 seller by making Goliath dependent on them

BK Beauty isn't Glossier. It's not Kylie Cosmetics. Most people have never heard of it. It is currently the top-selling brand on TikTok Shop across all categories — and it got there by refusing to compete with L'Oreal and Maybelline.

"They created partnerships with Maybelline, L'Oreal, and other major beauty brands that were just getting started on TikTok. They went to them and said: we actually know how to do TikTok ads better than you do. Instead of us competing with you — why don't we collaborate."

The incumbents had the budgets. BK Beauty had the channel expertise. The move: make Goliath's weakness your leverage. Now those big brands are funding BK Beauty's distribution while BK Beauty builds its own brand on the same ad spend. The David versus Goliath dynamic flips entirely when David makes Goliath dependent on him.

Harley's broader point: the biggest brands on the planet are not afraid of their direct competitors. "They're scared of two people in a garage." Large infrastructure makes big bets impossible — everyone's protecting their job, the playbook that worked for five years stays locked in. Small operators can move faster, test cheaper, and do things that don't scale. That last part is the real edge.

QVC rebuilt its entire checkout model so buyers never have to leave the video

"There are way too many ads and videos out there where you effectively have to leave the video to go make the purchase." QVC — a company that's been running TV shopping for decades — recognized that the friction of a four-page checkout was destroying conversions and rebuilt their entire commerce layer inside the video.

Product thumbnails appear during the stream. One-click checkout happens without leaving the content. The video keeps playing. The sale completes. No interruption, no context switch, no moment where a distracted buyer wanders off to a competitor.

The principle behind it goes beyond QVC's specific implementation. Buyers enter hyper-purchasing cycles — a decision to run a 5K means new shoes, new shorts, an armband for the phone. If you sell them the shorts and then force them to a different checkout page, "they might forget about that and then they'll remember again — but with a different retailer." That window is short and leaky. Every transition between contexts costs you customers who don't come back.

Mobile traffic already exceeds desktop for most retailers. The historical gap between mobile browsing and mobile purchasing closed when accelerated checkout removed the friction of entering card numbers on a phone. QVC's move is the same logic applied one step earlier — don't interrupt the buying moment at all.

Consumers are voting with their wallets to buy from the person behind the product — and channel-agnostic brands are destroying traditional retail

Harley's single biggest takeaway from Black Friday 2024: "Consumers actually prefer to buy direct with people that they believe are behind the product." Not from brands. From people.

"If you want someone to come to your gym, don't put some model up on the ad — put you up on the ad. People actually want to buy from other people." Gymshark works because Ben Francis is visible. Fenty works because Rihanna is the product. The brands that are winning aren't hiding the founder behind a logo.

The second shift is channel agnosticism. "There is no online versus offline. There is no channel. We're all channel agnostic now." Gymshark started as an online-only brand and is currently killing it in physical retail — not because they planned to be a retailer, but because they simply don't care where you buy. They care that you buy. They care that the experience is great. That's it.

Macy's and Best Buy aren't losing because of inventory problems. They're losing because they removed the human from the transaction and forced customers into a single purchasing path. The winners have no such preference. TikTok, YouTube, SMS, in-store, video commerce — wherever the customer already is, remove every barrier to buying right there.

The compounding hasn't started yet for most brands watching this

Every tactic here — pretesting products with early popups, gamified data collection, brand-first budget allocation, channel agnosticism, frictionless in-video checkout — shares a single underlying logic: the businesses that will own their categories in three years are making investments today that look like they're not working.

New Balance looked like it was failing for 18 months. Butcher Box gave away cooking classes with no ask. BK Beauty ran ads for L'Oreal instead of fighting them. None of those moves showed immediate ROI. All of them compounded.

The businesses that quit at month 12 hand the category to the ones who held at month 19.

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Topics: Black Friday tactics, ecommerce conversion optimization, brand building, LTV and CAC, content marketing, retail strategy, Shopify, omnichannel, data-driven marketing, entrepreneurship