Case Studies5 min read7 August 2025

How a Kids' Toy Brand Nailed Christmas on Shopify

Emma Clarke

Account Director

By planning their Shopify store for Christmas six months early, a children's toy brand generated £280k in December — their best trading month by 220% and without a single site outage.

For a children's toy brand, Christmas isn't a peak — it's the season. Half their annual revenue lands in six weeks. When they came to us in June, their immediate concern was that the previous Christmas had been a disaster: the site had gone down on Black Friday afternoon, email flows had failed to send at the right time, and they'd run out of their hero product on 18 December, leaving thousands of frustrated parents. We had six months to fix everything.

The Planning Phase

We began with a post-mortem of the previous Christmas: what went wrong, when, and why. The outage was traced to a third-party app attempting to run a database query on the order table at 11am on Black Friday — recoverable, but entirely preventable. The email failures were a Klaviyo flow misconfiguration. The stockout was a demand forecasting problem, not a Shopify problem.

Store Preparation

Removed all non-essential apps for November–December to reduce server-side load
Implemented Shopify's native sale pricing rather than app-based discounting
Pre-built all landing pages for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and gift guide content
Stress-tested checkout flow with a simulated load of 5x peak order volume
Set up inventory alerts at 20% stock remaining for all hero SKUs

Email and Flow Preparation

We rebuilt every Klaviyo flow from scratch with the Christmas calendar mapped in. Black Friday sequences were built and tested in October. A gifting guide email series was scheduled for late November. Post-purchase flows included age-appropriate gift recommendation emails timed for the gift recipient discovery window.

Inventory Planning

Working with the brand's buying team, we modelled demand scenarios for their top 20 SKUs using the previous two years of sales data. Conservative, expected, and optimistic forecasts were built, and stock orders were placed against the expected scenario with a 15% buffer. A 'low stock' badge was built into the theme to create urgency without deception.

Key insightDecember revenue: £280,000 — up 220% on the previous year. Zero site outages. Zero stockouts on hero products. Black Friday was their single biggest day ever.