I'd take the heat death of the universe over Black Friday sometimes...

Black Friday is supposed to be the great retail festival of the year, but for a small keyboard business it feels less like a party and more like being tied to the front of a runaway Amazon-branded bus. While the big players are doing power slides through warehouses the size of small countries, the likes of us at PT are stood there with a broom, a spreadsheet, and a customer inbox full of people asking why the £200 custom build isn’t suddenly 40% off.

 

Ridiculous expectations:

Somehow, Black Friday has gone from “the day a few big box stores do a sale” to “the week where every business on earth must ritually set fire to its margins or be declared dead”. Customers have been trained by years of shouty banners and countdown timers to assume that if it has a price tag, it must be slashed, torched, and hurled off a cliff the moment the calendar creeps towards late November.

For a small shop selling niche mechanical keyboards, that expectation is absurd. You are not shifting pallets of generic tat; you are importing limited runs, dealing with moody group buys, customs roulette, and paying through the nose for shipping, tax, storage, and the joy of answering “Are these in stock?” 47 times a day. There is no magical “oh don’t worry, the factory will just knock 30% off and send you a fruit basket” line item in the spreadsheet. Or if there is my accountant and I haven't found it yet...

Yet every November, the emails roll in: “What’s your Black Friday deal?” “When is the discount dropping?” “Will you be doing 50% off switches?” It’s like asking a Michelin-star restaurant when they’re doing a ‘buy one get one free’ on tasting menus because McDonald’s just ran a promo on nuggets. The underlying assumption is that if you don’t join the circus, you’ve somehow wronged people by… charging the same fair price you did all year.

 

The low-margin reality:

The dirty secret nobody on those giddy “Black Friday mega deal” billboards wants to talk about is this: Black Friday works if you are operating at industrial scale on high-volume, high-margin, mass-market stuff. If you can batter suppliers into submission, squeeze shipping costs, and shave pennies off everything with economies of scale that would make a spreadsheet weep, then yes, you can blow 30 - 40% off and still sleep at night.

Custom keyboard retail is the polar opposite. Margins are already thin because every part of the chain has a hand in your pocket. Designers need to be paid. Factories need to be paid. Freight companies, customs, VAT, payment processors, warehouse storage, packaging, and that one courier who seems to only deliver by launching parcels from orbit all need to be paid. By the time that limited-run keycap set is sat on a shelf in the UK, the margin is more “polite suggestion” than profit bonanza.

Then there’s the delightful world of group buys, where you shoulder risk and customer fury for months because someone, somewhere, decided that people would happily prepay for a keyboard that doesn’t exist yet. You’re already juggling cash flow and timelines like a caffeinated octopus, and someone on Instagram pops up with, “So… 25% off all in-stock and GB items for Black Friday, right?” No. That is how you go from “small business” to “tragic case study” in one weekend.

 

Forced into self-sabotage:

And yet, lots of small businesses still do it. Not because it makes solid commercial sense, but because there is this relentless, crushing sense that if you do nothing, you will be punished for it. Customers hold back in October, waiting to see if you’ll crack and throw your lovingly curated stock into the bargain bin. Sales go weirdly quiet, and the pressure ramps up: “If I don’t run a deal, I’m going to get steamrolled.”

So you sit there with a calculator at midnight trying to find a number that doesn’t make you vomit. Maybe 5%? Maybe free shipping? Maybe a small discount on certain lines? You know it will hurt, but you also know that social media will be full of “BLACK FRIDAY MADNESS” graphics and that at least some percentage of your audience has been conditioned to equate “no sale” with “rip-off”. So you chip away at your already flimsy margins, hoping to keep people happy and your brand visible, while the big platforms spend more on one banner ad than your entire monthly profit.

The most infuriating part is that many small retailers openly admit they don’t even know why they’re participating anymore; they’re just getting dragged along by the tide. It’s FOMO with spreadsheets: everyone’s jumping off the cliff, so you start calculating the least painful angle to follow them down. Except you’re not a billion-dollar mattress company; you’re a human being trying to keep stock flowing, staff paid, and customers served without needing to sell a kidney every Q4.

 

Warped customer behaviour

Black Friday also trashes the rhythm of normal trading. Customers delay perfectly sensible, full-price purchases in October and early November because they assume a sale is coming, and if you don’t do one, they can feel cheated even though your prices never went up in the first place. It encourages a kind of retail brinkmanship: “I’ll wait; I bet it’ll be cheaper later,” as though every niche keyboard SKU is a Tesco meal deal waiting to be rotated.

For a small keyboard shop, that delay is brutal. You still have rent, insurance, wages, inventory costs, and a warehouse that doesn’t magically become cheaper just because everyone is holding their breath for a “deal”. And if you run them, Ad costs spike during peak season too, so the very moment you need visibility most is when you’re being outbid by leviathans who can carpet-bomb every ad slot from here to Neptune. You either watch your ROAS tank or you overspend just to keep your logo vaguely visible in a sea of neon “50% OFF” nonsense. Thank god I've never gone down that rabbit hole.

To add insult to injury, those who only show up on Black Friday are often the least loyal customers you’ll ever see. They’ll buy once at a painful discount, then vanish when things go back to normal, possibly to complain somewhere that your non-Black-Friday price is “too high” because they saw a cheap OEM board on a mega-retailer for half the money. Meanwhile, the customers who do value what you do (curation, support, community, actual human service), would probably rather you stayed healthy and sustainable than knocked another ten quid off a board at your own expense. Thank you SPC.

 

The mental drain:

Then there’s the psychological side. Black Friday is marketed as “opportunity” for small businesses, but in reality it often feels like an exam you did not revise for and cannot afford to fail. You are bombarded with articles about “maximising your Black Friday impact” and “must-have strategies”, most of which assume you’ve got a marketing department, a data science team, and a spare warehouse full of generic stock ready to be dumped.

In a niche business, the “team” is often you, possibly one or two others, several thousand SKUs, and a to-do list that looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls. You’re managing operations, answering tickets, posting on socials, juggling suppliers, and trying to keep up with whatever customs has decided to do this week. Black Friday adds another layer of stress: designing promos, checking they don’t bankrupt you, updating banners, testing discount codes, planning email flows, and bracing for the inevitable “my discount didn’t apply properly” messages.

All this, right before the most important trading window of the year, when you actually need to be sharp, organised, and focused on delivering a good experience. Instead, you’re already exhausted from trying to play a game that was never designed for businesses your size. It’s like turning up to a drag race in a well-tuned but sensible manual hatchback and being expected to run the same times as a rocket-powered hypercar, while also running the ticket booth, the bar, and the timing system.

 

Why [Insert other colour] Friday makes sense:

Which is why things like Passenger Clothing’s “Green Friday” are such a breath of fresh air (no I'm not sponsored I just like them). Instead of hacking their prices to bits, they use the period to do something positive: planting trees and protecting rainforest with every order, turning the consumer feeding frenzy into something that at least nudges the world in a better direction. They have been running that model for years, showing that you can stand apart from the discount stampede and still resonate with customers who care about more than just the lowest possible number on a price tag. I really admire them and it gives me ideas for next year in line with our current carbon neutral stance.

That approach makes far more sense for small, values-led brands than joining the discount arms race. A “Green Friday” style campaign for a keyboard business could mean things like donating a portion of sales to digital inclusion or STEM education charities, supporting repair and right-to-repair initiatives, planting trees per order, or funding e-waste recycling rather than simply slicing prices and praying it comes good. You still give customers a reason to buy that feels special and time-bound, but you do it without wrecking margins or cheapening the perception of what you sell.

It also sends a clear message about what your brand stands for. Rather than “we’ll do anything to get your money this weekend”, it becomes “we’re here for the long term, we price fairly all year, and when this shopping madness rolls around, we’d rather do something that isn’t self-destructive or wasteful”. That doesn’t just attract sales; it builds loyalty - especially in a community-driven niche like custom keyboards, where people care about story, ethos, and the humans behind the switches as much as they care about the sound of a spacebar.

 

Choosing sustainability over stunts:

The truth is, Black Friday is increasingly being rejected by independent retailers who’ve done the maths and realised it simply doesn’t work in their favour. Many small businesses are pulling back, boycotting the event, or replacing it with alternatives that emphasise community, service, and sustainability over knee-jerk discounting. They are discovering that planned, controlled growth, supported by loyal customers who understand the value of what they’re buying. And its worth far more than one frantic weekend of margin carnage.

For a niche keyboard business, the choice is stark: either keep trying to imitate the pricing theatrics of global giants and bleed slowly, or step off the hamster wheel and do something more meaningful with this time of year. That might mean modest, targeted offers that genuinely make sense, or it might mean no discounts at all; just great products, clear communication, and maybe a “Green Friday” twist that turns November’s chaos into something that actually aligns with our values.

Because in the end, survival matters more than spectacle. A healthy, sustainable ProtoTypist that can keep stocking weird and wonderful boards, supporting the community, and shipping little boxes of happiness all year round is worth infinitely more than one weekend where everything is slightly cheaper and the business is slightly closer to the edge. Let the giants fight over who can burn the most margin; small shops have better things to build.