It's beginning to look a lot like peak season

Merry Christmas from Moving Tribes

In most industries, these last 2 weeks before Christmas represent a marked slowing down. Deals are put off to the New Year, meetings postponed and in this post-Covid world there is a suspicious increase in working from home.

Not so in retail and hospitality, where things are just getting started. In some retail sectors, the starting gun really fired in the weeks around Black Friday and the peak season will continue right up to Christmas.

In others, where the January Sales are the critical period, these 2 weeks represent a last round of polishing the stores, training new colleagues and spell-checking the marketing material before the post-Christmas rush begins.

And of course, in hospitality these are critical weeks where operators pray that trains keep running, the weather doesn’t get too extreme and the office Christmas party doesn’t get too rowdy.

As I look down the Moving Tribes mailing list, almost a year after arriving here at Substack, what I’m most proud of is the sheer breadth of representation the subscriber base represents. Joining you as regular readers of these posts are folks from almost every corner of retail and hospitality. There are chairs, CEOs and board directors, store teams, marketers and operators from every sector, every organisational level and a surprisingly broad geography. And adjacent to retail and hospitality there are also advisors, investors, journalists and others with an interest in consumer business too.

What that means, of course, is that we are all united by the point I made at the beginning of this piece - this is the busy season, and there is a lot to do!

With that in mind, this final Moving Tribes post for 2023 has a short and simple message - I wish you the very best for the coming weeks - both personally and professionally and I hope that after what has been a decidedly ‘up and down’ year, your target consumer turns out in droves, loves what you’ve done and that your tills ring like Jingle Bells.

We have a rich set of posts planned at Moving Tribes in 2024, and I suspect that ‘events’ are going to give us a lot to talk about as well. I look forward to reconnecting then - in the meantime, keep well and good trading.

Ian