Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) typically rewards the brands that plan ahead. Many CPG brands default to discounting ever year with a storewide percentage off. While a flat discount is attractive, it does not tell a customer anything about who you are, and it trains shoppers to wait for the next markdown instead of buying at full price. For food & bev, beauty, health, supplement, home, and lifestyle brands trying to build long-term customer relationships, that is an expensive habit to reinforce.

There is a more strategic way to think about BFCM: treat the weeks around the sales period as a content and merchandising opportunity, not a single sale event. Instead of one offer, build a calendar of offers including bundles, gifts-with-purchase, limited editions, and early access drops that connect back to your brand's story. When a discount does show up, it should be attached to something specific, not applied storewide.

Discounts Are a Tool, Not a Strategy

A 20% off sitewide banner says nothing about your product, your ingredients, or why a customer should choose you over the brand next to you on the shelf, virtual or otherwise. Creativity around brand storytelling is a powerful lever during BFCM, and discounts should support the storytelling rather than replace it. That distinction matters because:

• Bundles tell a story a discount code cannot. A "holiday skin routine" bundle communicates how products work together. A flat 25% off communicates nothing beyond price.
• Limited editions and gifts-with-purchase protect margin. Giving away a smaller companion product with a purchase costs less than discounting the entire order, and it feels like a gift rather than a markdown.
• Daily drops create a reason to come back. A single sale gets one visit. A calendar of offers, each tied to a different product story, gives customers a reason to check your site or open your emails multiple times during the week.

When you do launch a discount, tie it to something specific: a new bundle, a hero product, a limited edited product, keeping the offer aligned with your brand identity.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Hero Cosmetics, the acne-care brand known for its Mighty Patch line, built its holiday campaign around this structure. Rather than running one storewide sale, the brand added a dedicated Holiday category to its site navigation, giving customers a clear hub for every gift-focused product and bundle on the site.

From there, Hero Cosmetics launched a Gift Guide landing page featuring curated bundles for different recipients, styled with new seasonal photography and festive branding. The bundles were not new products; they were existing offerings re-merchandised for the season, which meant the creative lift was in the presentation, not in building new SKUs from scratch. That same holiday photography carried through to product pages, where a limited-edition gift bag was offered with kit purchases, adding a gifting touch without discounting the core product.

Midway through November, the brand layered in a "5 Days of Gifting" campaign, promoted through a dedicated landing page, email, and Instagram posts and stories. It is worth noting that Hero Cosmetics did pair this campaign with discount codes at checkout, making the discount one part of a broader structure built on daily engagement, bundling, and a consistent gifting narrative across channels.

Why This Matters for CPG Brands

CPG brands face a specific set of BFCM pressures that make a discount-only approach especially costly:

• Margins are tight. Many CPG products carry lower per-unit margins than other categories, so a storewide discount has an outsized impact on profitability compared to a bundle or gift-with-purchase built from existing inventory.
• Repeat purchase and subscription models depend on perceived value. If a customer's first impression of your brand is a deep discount, it is harder to justify full price on their second order.
• Retail comparison is constant. CPG shoppers are used to comparing your product against what is on the shelf at Target or Ulta. A story-driven bundle differentiates you from the offerings available on that shelf.

A story-led calendar of offers gives CPG brands more content than a single sale would: gifting angles, ingredient stories, and bundle narratives that can be reused in email, SMS, and social content throughout the peak sales period.

Building Your Own Brand-Aligned Offer Calendar

A few practical steps to apply this before Black Friday arrives:

1. Audit your existing bundle and gift-with-purchase potential. Look at what you already sell that pairs naturally together.
2. Build a dedicated holiday collection or navigation entry. Give customers one clear place to find every seasonal offer.
3. Map a calendar, not a single date. Assign each day of the BFCM window a distinct offer, whether that is a bundle, a gift-with-purchase, or early access to a limited edition, and plan the email, SMS, and social content to support each one.
4. Use discounts selectively and specifically. If you include a percentage off, attach it to a particular bundle or hero product rather than applying it storewide, so the discount reinforces a the brand story you are trying to tell.

This approach comes from our review of the Hero Cosmetics holiday campaign as part of DTC Patterns, Barrel's ongoing research project examining real direct-to-consumer purchases and the marketing and UX decisions behind them.

See Where Your Site Stands Before BFCM Hits

Building an offer calendar like this starts with knowing where your current site and merchandising stand today. That's what Val Geisler, our Director of Strategy, and Christine Carforo, our Director of Design, dig into during our live user experience (UX) teardowns ahead of the BFCM code freeze. Submit your site for consideration and for the chance to win one of five Nintendo Switch 2s and a discounted UX Audit and BFCM Roadmap.

Submissions close September 16th. Submit your site for a live site audit.

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