The Six-Week Holiday Sprint That Makes or Breaks Your Year
- Jon Allen
- 3 minutes ago
- 4 min read
If you sell into big retail, your year isn’t 12 months long. It’s 12 months… plus the six-week sprint from early November through New Year’s.
That window behaves like a “13th month” for your business. Over the last five years,
November and December have averaged about 19% of total annual U.S. retail sales. And in the most recent season, core holiday sales in November and December grew 4% to a record $994.1 billion.
Now the National Retail Federation (NRF) is forecasting that 2025 holiday sales will pass $1 trillion for the first time, with growth of 3.7% to 4.2% over last year.
So yeah. Those six weeks carry a lot of weight.
But here’s the part that gets missed: holiday execution doesn’t just show up in your Q4 P&L.
It shows up in next year’s buyer meetings.
Why this “13th month” is wildly over-weighted
Retailers treat the holiday period like a stress test for your brand.
How you perform from early November through New Year’s quietly influences:
Future shelf negotiations
Did your brand actually drive incremental volume when traffic was there?
Or did your buyer have to clean up out-of-stocks and customer complaints?
Trade spend discussions
Were promotions clean, properly set up, and easy to reconcile?
Or did your team leave a trail of messy invoice claims, billbacks, and “please research” tickets?
Assortment and space decisions
Did your key SKUs earn their real estate when shoppers were in peak “grab and go” mode?
Or did you lag the category or private label when it mattered most?
When buyers sit down to build 2026 plans, they don’t just remember the pitch deck. They remember holiday execution.
How small lapses multiply into big problems
Nobody plans to blow holiday. What happens instead is a slow drip of avoidable mistakes:
One late pallet to a key distribution center when the first big promotion hits
A mis-ticketed promo where the scan rate doesn’t match what was negotiated
A handful of routing guide misses that trigger automatic fees
An internal rush job on price-file updates that misses a retailer cut-off
Each one feels like “just another deduction.” The infamous “cost of doing business.”
But they add up—financially and politically. Holiday is when those little lapses are most visible and most expensive.
The “holiday scoreboard” your buyer is actually watching
Here’s the scoreboard that lives in your buyer’s head (and in their reports):
Sell-through by week, by store, by channel
Did your brand over- or under-index the category during key weeks?
How did promoted weeks perform vs. the lift you promised?
In-stock and fill rate
Did your items stay on the shelf and online?
Did store teams complain that they “couldn’t keep you in stock”—in a good way or bad way?
Compliance scorecards
Routing and labeling: Did you follow the playbook or trigger auto-fees?
On-time in-full (OTIF): Were you the vendor they could trust not to break the supply chain on their busiest days?
You may be focused on top-line holiday volume. Your buyer is looking at performance, predictability, and pain.
Fictional example (for illustration only)
Let’s make this real with a made-up story.
Fictional example (not a real brand):A mid-sized snack brand does 22% of its annual volume between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. They crush their sales targets—up 15% versus last holiday. But behind the scenes, they: Miss a key price-file cut-off, creating price variance deductions on multiple promotions. Ignore a routing guide update that changes preferred carriers to a major distribution center. Rush several last-minute promo setups, leading to mismatched ads and scan rates. By the time the dust settles, they’ve racked up $250,000 in compliance and price-variance deductions. On paper, their holiday looks fantastic. In the buyer’s mind, they’re now “that vendor” who drives sales and headaches.
Top-line looks great. Margin and trust quietly erode.
How to treat the six-week window like the 13th month
You don’t need a giant war room to win the season. But you do need intentionality. Think of a few simple moves:
Lock in your “holiday control tower”
Weekly huddle with sales, supply chain, finance, and deductions.
One shared view of: POS, in-stocks, major deductions, and upcoming promos.
Protect your price files and promos
Double-check cost files and promo details before Black Friday and big events.
Confirm scan rates, discounts, and effective dates in writing.
Watch OTIF like a hawk
Flag high-risk loads: weather, capacity constraints, carrier changes.
Make proactive calls when you know you’ll miss—buyers remember honesty.
Track deductions in-season, not three months later
If you see the same code popping up across multiple invoices, investigate now.
Many preventable hits are caught too late to fix the underlying issue.
Document what you fixed
When you solve a recurring problem, keep receipts: emails, policy updates, process changes.
That becomes evidence of maturity in your 2026 line review.
How this plays into your 2026 buyer story
Fast forward to next spring.
You walk into the buyer meeting with more than a glossy deck:
A clean summary of holiday POS vs. category
Clear evidence that you improved OTIF or reduced chargebacks
A short list of holiday pain points you’ve already solved, with proof
That’s the difference between a buyer thinking,“Nice brand, but kind of high-maintenance,” and “These folks handle holidays like pros. Let’s lean in.”
At Woodridge Retail Group, this is often our role: helping suppliers see the whole scoreboard, not just the sales spike. We’re looking at holiday through the same lens your buyer uses—sell-through, compliance, and profitability—not just whether the top line went up.
If you treat the six-week sprint like a 13th month and manage it with that level of discipline, you’re not just chasing Q4 wins. You’re quietly shaping next year’s story in your favor.
