background:
Black Friday is a major event, the most lucrative day of the year for most retailers, including Macy’s.
Challenge:
The most challenging part of the day is corralling >700 specials, ensuring they align with the in-store specials, and accommodating late changes as other retailers specials start to become public.
Required Outcomes:
Successful launch
Specials collected successfully
Late change accommodation with minimal risk
Project Plan Outline
- Kickoff Meeting
- Kickoff with Buyers and Merchants (Timeline review)
- Initial Specials Scrub (vs. Print)
- Specials Input (Google Docs)
- Lock schedule - contact required to change
- Copy team rewrites
- Photography
- Creative Review
- Shell
- Special “Tiles” (more to come on that)
- Supporting Media
- Final Specials Scrub (vs. Print)
- Development
- Special feed
- Final QA
- Curveball!
- Launch
No More Excel
Moving out of Excel was one of the first priorities. Historically, spreadsheets had always been used to collect the specials from the buying and merchant teams. Copies of spreadsheets were created, then identifying the correct master was impossible. One person could open and edit a sheet, and think their change was accepted, even if it was a copy of a copy.
We moved into Google sheets for merchants and buyers to enter the specials. This was a huge win from the excel days. For one, they allowed multiple inputs at one time! This prevented the dreaded excel file duplication that had been a major issue in years past. It also allowed us to lock the sheets once specials entry time was closed, and we could build an easy change tracker, as conflicting feedback also caused some of the problems.
Special Tiles
The one solution that helped us was to build out each of the specials in a tile format, as pictured to the left. This way, specials could live in multiple categories easily (by duplicating the tile, but also be generated easily.
We worked with engineering to build a CMS-like tool that we called the "combobulator." This tool would do 2 things:
- Load all specials into a PDF Preview for easy review.
- Feed the specials information into the site prior to launch.
For this execution, the combobulator was a huge win, saving production design hours of manual specials editing.
Success
We had a successful launch here, on time launch with no critical bugs. As usual, these were giant revenue days, but we also earned a YoY increase and met our goals for the day.
All of the specials collected successfully, and having the single source of truth of the Google Sheets mitigated the risk of conflicting information and late changes that we couldn't accommodate. It also enforced deadline adherence, although we also accommodated late changes with minimal risk due to the special tile feed. For example, a Kohl's towel special was announced days before launch, with a better price, and we were able to make the change without risking the experience, unlike in years past.