The 96-hour litmus test: What Black Friday weekend says about brands that last

“This is our Super Bowl,” Abby Price says. “Even if we didn’t do any marketing, it would be our best time of year.”   

For the founder of NYC embroidery brand Abbode, Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) represents everything. In 2024, Shopify merchants like Abby broke records, generating $11.5 billion in sales over that weekend. And this year is poised to be the first-ever $1 trillion holiday season. As the clock counts down, the weekend can be make or break for brands big and small.

"As much as you can possibly plan, things will come up, there’s no time off,” says Lindsay Silberman of Hotel Lobby Candle, whose bootstrapped business used to sell out before BFCM could even begin. “All you can do is be nimble.”

For many, BFCM is more than a sales event—it's a systems stress test that rewards months of preparation with ripple effects that extend through the entire next year. If done right, the weekend's performance can determine expansion plans and create economic impact far beyond those 96 hours.

This November, BFCM veterans are tweaking their playbooks while rookies are casting their bets. By midnight that Monday, brands will know exactly where they stand. 

When going viral isn't enough

Weeks before BFCM, pop singer Sabrina Carpenter wore an Abbode piece on Saturday Night Live. Abby's phone went nuclear. Instagram followers jumped 10% overnight. Her website traffic spiked. The timing felt cosmic—a massive awareness boost right before the most important shopping weekend of the year.

Now Abby is projecting her biggest year ever: over $1 million in sales during the holiday season. The Carpenter moment certainly helps, flooding her brand with new eyeballs and followers. But Abby knows viral moments don’t always translate directly to sales. Abby’s been here before. She's seen the sugar high and the crash.

What actually matters? The backend machine she started building in July, negotiating with manufacturers, calculating capacity limits, and stress-testing fulfillment logistics. Viral moments create awareness. Strategies create businesses.

"These one-off viral moments, they’re not changing my whole business," she explains. “Without the right systems, it can be just a blip.” But Abby has the systems. She has the increased awareness from Carpenter's SNL moment. BFCM is when she gets to cash all those chips in.

Moving from scarcity to strategy

This isn’t the first rodeo for Lindsay either. When she co-founded Hotel Lobby Candle during COVID in 2020, the former magazine editor was soon faced with the operational realities of scaling a candle business. In their first two years, there was no BFCM for the brand due to lack of inventory.

"We would completely sell out before Black Friday even happened,” Lindsay says. “We had nothing to go based off of other than our gut instinct, and we were super conservative because we didn't have enough capital to take chances." 

The accidental scarcity worked in their favor, creating urgency among customers who knew Hotel Lobby Candle products had a tendency to sell out. But Lindsay knew that wasn't a sustainable strategy—it was just luck. 

Now she runs inventory projections almost a year in advance and conducts competitor analysis to optimize promotions. The sophistication extends to how she balances her 200,000 Instagram followers with the day-to-day demands of running her brand. “We have really great teams in place to spearhead each of those things,” Lindsay says. Hotel Lobby Candle has evolved from "fly by the seat of our pants" to strategic precision. And for good reason, Lindsay's Q4 sales now represent at least half their annual revenue.

Building from the breakdown 

Abby knows firsthand what it feels like to be caught unprepared. Last year, she was riding high on BFCM sales, orders flooding in faster than she could refresh her Shopify dashboard. Then the realization hit. The brand had promised holiday delivery on thousands of custom orders, and the small in-house team couldn't possibly deliver.

"We ended up over-promising and under-delivering to our customers," Abby says. “Orders placed in November didn't ship until January.” The team created personalized apology cards so customers had something to put under the tree while the actual presents sat in production purgatory.

"That was horrible for them. We felt so bad. That was something we never wanted to do again."

This year's different. Abby determined the best cutoff dates for holiday orders to avoid disappointed customers. She also implemented template systems—customers can still personalize with colors, names, and icons, but within parameters that won't break the production line.

It's the kind of minutiae that sounds boring but makes the difference between scaling and imploding.

"Hopefully this year I'll just be laying in my bed, refreshing my Shopify app and seeing all the sales coming in," Abby says.

Lindsay has watched BFCM itself evolve from a weekend sprint into what she calls "a longer period of intensity." When she was an editor covering sales, brands started promotions on Black Friday. Now early access begins as early as October. 

"It's a good thing and a bad thing," she says. "Shoppers are less pressured, and we have more time to drive revenue. But it's a lot of emails, a lot of texts, and sustained momentum over that period." 

Her advice for first-time BFCM brands: Have clarity on what matters. 

"Decide on very clear messaging and a clear goal. In the past, we would just throw out some promo because we knew we had to do something. Now we're intentional—are we trying to get higher average order values? Acquire new customers? Get more products in more people's hands?"

The economics of everything

This weekend matters because here's what happens when indie brands nail BFCM: They create jobs. Abby went from party-of-one to employing 20 people in New York. BFCM performance directly determines staffing levels, vendor commitments, and business expansion plans into the following year. 

The ripple effects multiply because Abbode does everything domestically. Abby has rebuilt a slice of New York's garment heritage with actual artisans doing actual craft work.

"We're one of the few businesses that still employs people who are artisans and craftsmen, who work with their hands and aren't just sitting behind a computer," Abby explains. 

While Abby employs 20 people directly, Lindsay runs what she calls a “wheel” operation—herself and her husband at the center, directing “the spokes” of multiple contractors and five agencies. “We would never be able to tackle something like Black Friday Cyber Monday without the teams we have in place. We work with contractors and agencies for virtually everything,” she says. 

“The revenue driven allows us to bring more people on, and by doing that, it allows us to continue scaling up."

Both approaches prove the same economic principle: BFCM success creates jobs, whether through direct employment or the creative economy of specialists who support growing brands. 

Bending but not breaking

BFCM lasts 96 hours, but its verdict echoes all year. Come Monday night, when the sales stop and the real work begins, some brands will scale. Some will scramble. The difference was already decided months ago.

The journeys of Abbode and Hotel Lobby Candle map the path every successful indie brand must walk. The real victory isn't the celebrity shoutout or even hitting seven figures. It's building something robust enough to bend but not break under pressure.