Please please please don’t fall for the holiday launch trap… ever again.
My holiday wish for you, my dearest first-time founders, is just to love yourself a little and don’t make a holiday launch the make-or-break for your brand new brand.
Every year I watch brands repeat the same ritual:
Somewhere around March or April, someone says, “Let’s launch a new product for the holidays.”
And suddenly the whole team is manifesting a Q4 debut like it’s just a question of “focus” or “hustle.”
But the timeline is almost always completely disconnected from reality — not in a negative way, just in a physics exists kind of way.
Product development has its own pace.
Tooling has its own pace.
Production, freight, compliance, risk testing, packaging, QA — they all have their own immutable clocks.
And when your launch goal ignores those clocks, the outcome is totally predictable:
Rushed samples
Rushed revisions
Rushed production
Rushed QC
Air freighting half the PO
Destroyed margins
A product that’s “fine” instead of great
All in service of hitting an arbitrary “Holiday launch!” milestone that was unreasonable from day one. 🫠
The irony is that holiday urgency is usually what kills the launch, not what accelerates it.
If you are an early stage consumer brand and if you want a strong Q4 release and if you care about yourself or the businesses that serve you, you need to be thinking about your brand new holiday product launch now, not in April.
There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but ambition without a healthy and educated appreciation for lead times and their predictable unpredictability is just self-inflicted chaos.
If you want to win the holidays, start earlier.
If you can’t start earlier, for the love of pete, just launch later!
And if you’re ever choosing between “rush everything” and “wait and do it right,” there’s only one answer that protects your margins, your brand, and your sanity.
The calendar doesn’t care about your vision, but your customers — and your P&L — will absolutely care about your quality.
My holiday wish for you, my dearest first-time founders, is just to love yourself a little and don’t make a holiday launch the make-or-break for your brand new brand.
PS: I make a big exception here for seasoned, battle-tested teams that know how to play it right. When product lifecycle management was my #1 job at GIR and Mvnifest, our shortest idea-to-launch cycle was 3 weeks (this one time during Covid when the world stopped turning.) And we routinely crushed 3-4 months from idea to market. But that was after years and years of practice, with an entrenched team, an established supply chain, and a vertically integrated fulfillment operation.
For those of you in the peak season trenches, I’m sending you good vibes!
Don’t forget to drink water! May your BFCM goals be exceeded and your Thanksgiving plates be very full this week. 🦃