Black Friday 2018
23 Nov 2018
Shop Small this Christmas
A whole 365 days have come and gone since Black Friday 2017 hit our inboxes, wallets and high-streets… An estimated £10 billion was spent in the UK across Black Friday 2017 and many businesses offered special buys, spectacular savings, Black Friday events and epic sale bonanzas.
As a small, independent photography business, we found ourselves in a bit of a quandary – should we get involved in the Black Friday hype or stick to our ethics of charging fairly across the whole year for the quality of what we do?
The challenge of small
The reality is that we’ve run Black Friday specials before but they just didn’t sit well with us. Being honest, we felt a little consumed by the Black Friday build-up – we felt that we’d be missing out as a business if we didn’t get involved.
Part of the challenge of being small is that we’re already operating on tight margins. Sure, we can be agile and respond to a changing market place relatively swiftly, but we’re also not able to compete with the giants of the high-street and online juggernauts who have marketing budgets that look like telephone numbers.
So for Black Friday 2018 we said no.
Shop small, shop local: celebrate independent
Instead, this year, we have joined up with our fellow independents and have committed to Small Business Saturday.
Saturday 1st December sees independent and local companies stand united and proud of our place as the backbone of small and local business. Businesses like twenty-seven.co.uk who create the amazing Christmas bunting above.
Truth be told, #SmallBizSatUK just fits with us at Blue Sky Photography and our ethics of small business: working hard (sometimes too hard) and hook, line and sinker believing in what we do…
#SmallBizSatUK
I was touched to the core when I read the story of the bookshop Imagined Things in Harrogate which took £12.34 one Monday in June 2018 (read the story on the BBC News website if you missed it).
The resulting outpouring of support following the bookshop’s tweet from across the world was amazing.
So this Christmas as you shop to gift, you genuinely can make a difference to the small companies across the land by buying small.
Be that supporting your local butcher (check out our amazing client Saunderson’s) or buying a new sofa (go and snuggle down in one from our friends and clients at Nordic Living) you can make a difference to the survival of a small business in your neighbourhood. Let’s do this together.
Big Blue Sky love,
Niels (and the team) x
