Black Friday Did a Record $11.8B Last Year. Here's the BFCM and Affiliate Playbook Josh Snow Used to Capitalize on It and Scale His Brand to Nine Figures.
Josh opens the spy tool live on last year's winners, brand by brand, then lays out the 60-day build to November 27 for ecom brands and the Q5 window for anyone selling through a booked call.
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183.4K viewsBFCM 2025 creator videos. Data: TikTok, FastMoss.
Inside the replay
Last Black Friday, brand by brand
Josh goes into the spy tool live and pulls the accounts that actually printed. What they ran, when they launched it, how long the winners had been live before the day, and what the creative looked like when it broke. Other people's brands, across categories.
Where the money moved in 2025
US Cyber Week did $44.2B online, up 7.7%. Black Friday hit a record $11.8B and Cyber Monday $14.25B (Adobe Analytics). TikTok Shop's BFCM weekend cleared $500M in four days, with livestream sellers up 84% across 760,000+ sessions (TikTok newsroom).
The number that matters
More than 60% of US TikTok Shop sales now route through creators the brand doesn't employ. The fastest-growing BFCM channel runs through a routing layer most brands haven't built.
Ecom: the 60-day build
What gets seeded this month, rights-captured in October and amplified in November, plus what you no longer have time to start. Offer structure, bundle and AOV mechanics, and how to walk in with winners already proven instead of testing into the weekend.
Non-ecom: anything ending in a booked call
Services, coaching, B2B, local and SaaS. How to price around the Q4 spike instead of competing in it, buy the January auction while everyone else is dark, and build an offer against new-year intent.
Q5, the window nobody buys
December 26 to mid-January. Advertisers pull budget, the auction empties, and gift-card and returns-credit money is still live. The cheapest attention of the year against buyers who are still buying.
From Josh
I bootstrapped SNOW to $100M in about 3 years with no outside money and got it onto shelves at CVS, Target, Nordstrom Rack and Neiman Marcus. I have also done about $84M in sales through affiliates and paid out around $10M in commissions. On September 28 I pointed that playbook at Black Friday 2026 and ran it live, with the spy tool open, on the brands that won last year.
For you if
- You sell direct to consumers online and Q4 is your biggest window
- You have creator posts that sold and you want them working as ads before the weekend
- You have Meta spend going into Q4 and only one or two creators feeding it
- You want an affiliate channel still selling in January
Skip it if
- You are still proving the product
- You want a discount template and a countdown timer