Eleven micro-seasons: rebuilding a party supplies calendar

The brand planned its year around Halloween and New Year, and treated everything else as background. In reality its catalog served eleven distinct occasions — graduations, baby showers, two different summer holidays, a birthday theme refresh cycle — each with a three-to-five week demand window that opens about six weeks before the date.

Missing the opening of a window is unrecoverable, because the window closes before inventory can arrive and advertising can build rank. Every year ended with hundreds of thousands of dollars of themed stock that would not sell for another twelve months, if ever, and storage fees on all of it.

We rebuilt the year as eleven small campaigns instead of two big ones.

• Demand windows mapped from search data — the exact week each occasion's searches start rising, per theme.
• A six-week lead rule — listings live, indexed and advertising from six weeks before each date, not two.
• Multipack SKUs sized to the occasion — a shower kit and a graduation kit rather than loose components the shopper has to assemble.
• Exit plan per window — markdown triggers by sell-through percentage, so leftovers clear inside the season instead of becoming next year's storage bill.

Sell-through on seasonal stock went from 61% to 94%, cutting annual write-offs from $188k to $31k.

Revenue grew 26% for the year, most of it from the nine occasions the brand had previously ignored. Peak-week ACoS improved nine points because listings now enter each window already ranked, rather than buying visibility from a standing start in the final two weeks.