Last week I talked about selling to your warm audience. This week is about something related but distinct: using the cultural calendar to show what your business actually values — and turning those moments into sales opportunities that feel earned rather than forced.
The fashion industry has a version of this, but it’s mostly mechanical — spring collection, mid-year sale, stocktake clearance. Built-in reasons to contact customers and create urgency. That part is worth borrowing. What fashion mostly misses is the deeper opportunity: that a well-chosen cultural moment doesn’t just create a reason to buy, it tells your audience something true about who you are and who you’re for.
When you mark Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day — not with a discount, but with genuine acknowledgment of the people your work is built around — you’re not running a campaign. You’re demonstrating your values publicly, to exactly the people those values matter to. The sale, if there is one, comes after the recognition. That’s a different thing entirely from a Christmas promotion with a bow on it.
Why it works
Three things happen when a campaign is genuinely aligned with a cultural moment your audience cares about: recognition, community, and urgency. Your people feel seen. They feel the particular warmth of someone marking something that matters to them. And if there’s a time-bound element — a product, an offer, an event — there’s a real reason to act now rather than later.
What those three things add up to is higher engagement than standard promotional content. The mechanism isn’t the discount or the deadline — it’s the alignment. You’re meeting people where their attention and emotion already are, and you’ve demonstrated that you belong there.
The Patagonia example worth knowing
Patagonia’s approach to Black Friday is the counterintuitive example the industry talks about every year. Instead of running a traditional sale, they run a “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign — promoting the environmental cost of overconsumption while driving massive brand awareness and loyalty. Their Black Friday email open rates consistently exceed 40%, roughly double the industry average, because subscribers know the email will contain something interesting, not just a coupon code. The brand sells more by advertising less.
This is the version of seasonal marketing worth aspiring to — not a discount bolted onto an existing product, but a campaign so aligned with what the brand actually stands for that it becomes expected, anticipated, something people look forward to.
Your occasions are not my occasions
This is the part that requires actual thought. The right seasonal calendar for your business is not just Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and whatever’s trending.
Tiny Beginnings Co. makes hand-painted watercolour keepsakes from ultrasound scans. She might want to acknowledge Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day — not as a discount opportunity, but as a genuine moment of recognition for the people her work is built around. That would be completely wrong for my business. For me, International Women’s Day and Katherine Johnson’s birthday make obvious sense. For a craft business selling at markets, a mid-year stocktake sale is practical and expected. For a doula, it might be World Doula Week.
A good place to start if you’re not sure what fits: awarenessdays.com is searchable and filterable. nationaldaycalendar.com is comprehensive, if US-heavy. Filter for what genuinely connects with your people — not whatever’s trending, not whatever everyone else is doing.
What Matriarch actually does with this
Since I’m asking you to do it, it’s only fair I show you mine. Four occasions, one per quarter:
March 8 — International Women’s Day. Not the corporate pink version. The real one — about building something while the world is structurally not set up for you to do it. That’s what IWD is actually about when you strip the hashtags off it, and it’s directly what Matriarch exists to address.
June — Pride Month. Matriarch is explicitly for women, trans women, non-binary and gender queer people. Pride Month is when I say that out loud most clearly, and make sure the people it applies to know they’re not an afterthought.
August 26 — Katherine Johnson’s birthday. Black mathematician whose calculations were load-bearing and essential to NASA’s first crewed spaceflights — while she was working through racial segregation and her name was unknown to almost everyone. The pioneer whose work made the whole thing possible and who nobody knew about. That’s a conversation Matriarch should be having every year.
November 19 — Women’s Entrepreneurship Day. A moment to talk about what women-owned businesses are actually up against. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly what Matriarch is built around.
What a campaign actually looks like
A campaign is not a post. It’s a minimum of three touchpoints that feel like they belong together — and research shows up to eight is worthwhile if the content has enough thought in it.
In practice that means: at least two emails (one to open the moment, one closer to the end with a reminder or a last chance), at least one social post that reinforces the same idea, and something on your website that signals to anyone who clicks through that they’ve landed in the right place. A banner. A featured product. A dedicated page if the occasion warrants it. Nothing elaborate — just enough that someone who came from your email doesn’t land on a homepage that looks like the campaign never happened.
That website moment does something else worth knowing about: it reassures people that your business is active. This sounds strange but it’s well documented — a website that appears current and seasonally aware reads as a business that’s open, attentive, and trustworthy. A static website that never changes does the opposite, even if nothing is actually wrong. Seasonal updates, even small ones, do real work just by existing.
The seasonal product
The version of this that can really move the needle is creating something specifically for the occasion. Tiny Beginnings Co. offered her watercolour ultrasound keepsakes as Christmas ornaments during the holiday season. It worked because the product makes complete sense in context: you hang it on your tree, in your home, as part of a celebration. Take the Christmas tree away and it’s just a differently-shaped keepsake. The occasion is what activates it.
That’s the bar. The product needs to make sense because of the occasion, not just alongside it. An Easter egg without Easter is weird-shaped chocolate. A Halloween tax return won’t work. The ornament without a Christmas tree doesn’t have the same meaning. When the occasion is what makes the product make sense, you have a seasonal product. When it’s just your existing product with a themed graphic on it, you don’t — and the campaign will feel like exactly that.
The lifecycle version
While you’re thinking about the calendar, it’s worth knowing that lifecycle campaigns — triggered by a personal milestone rather than a cultural one — outperform standard seasonal campaigns on almost every metric. Someone’s birthday. The anniversary of their first purchase or first appointment. Their due date. These are personal seasonal moments, and they convert at roughly double the rate of standard campaigns because they’re about the individual, not just the time of year.
The catch is you have to collect the data to make them work. Which is a reason to start collecting it now, even if you’re not ready to run the campaigns yet.
Today’s challenge
Find something to celebrate. Pick one occasion in the next three months and plan a campaign around it — emails, posts, a moment on your website. Schedule the content now if you can. Planning ahead is what makes this manageable rather than a last-minute scramble.
What are you going to celebrate?