Nov 23, 2017 — Over the next week we’re posting more than 40 different sales covering pre-Black Friday, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. That’s everything from nearly-free mystery 🎁 shirts to 50% off sitewide coupons. Most only run a day or three, but I started collecting them months ago.
Several years ago, posting holiday sales was a manual affair. I’d make a spreadsheet of the dozen or so websites we followed. I’d code up the list in HTML, stay up till midnight (no joke) 👨🏻💻 and press “upload” at 12:01 AM Friday. Edits would be made directly to the website over the next few days. Same deal for the newsletter templates too.
As we added more and more t-shirt websites, and they added more and more sales 🗣(“pre- pre-Black Friday”) 🎅 the spreadsheet and updates got more and more crazy and I was spending less and less time with family 😩 during the week.
Last year I helped myself by integrating the sales into the website’s content management system. That way I could schedule individual sales with start- and end- dates, and queue them up 💪 long before the holidays kick off.
This year we started reaching out to our now huge list of t-shirt websites in October. As they finalized their sales, we scheduled them out and now the website robots 🤖are handling it.
…which freed me up to write this story.