What eleven competitors actually did last Black Friday, and what Little Hyde & Hare should do about it

The Black Friday read: three brands held the line, and they are the three that look most like us

Of the eleven brands, three ran no discount whatsoever during the 15 November to 3 December window. ME+EM ran zero offer ads across Black Friday and opened its sale on 17 December instead, at up to 50% off, online only. With Nothing Underneath carried offer language on 1% of its entire Q4 output, and the only recurring term was a standing free delivery line. Sezane ran no percentage discount anywhere in the quarter, choosing a complimentary gift in the run up to Christmas instead.

That is the pattern worth noticing. The brands that held price are the premium, design led, natural fibre names. The brands that discounted hardest are the volume retailers. Boden ran a department store calendar: 25% off in October, 30% off and a Cyber Monday push in late November, then up to 60% off from 17 December, with Black Friday creative alone spread across 125 ads. Piglet in Bed was the most promotional in the set, with 72% of its Black Friday window ads carrying an offer, and it started earliest, putting Black Friday creative live on 6 November.

Timing splits the same way. The discounters went early: Rise & Fall peaked its launches on 6 November, Piglet in Bed on 14 November, a full fortnight before the day itself. The brands that held price either did nothing or waited until the season was over. There is no middle path visible in this data where a premium brand runs a modest, well mannered Black Friday discount. They either commit to the calendar or sit it out.

One correction to our own previous work. The July 2026 report on this category concluded that Organic Zoo never breaks character and runs zero promotion even at Christmas. This fuller pull shows that is wrong: Organic Zoo did discount, up to 50% off. What it did do, and this is the more useful finding, is lead with brand voice rather than the number. Twenty five of its ads carried Black Friday branding and only two mentioned the depth at all. The creative said Black Friday with feeling and Black Friday the Organic Zoo way. The discount was real but it was never the headline.

The table below ranks the Black Friday window ads by how long they ran multiplied by how many variants carried them, which is the only durability proxy the UK Ad Library allows. Note that ads which merely overlapped the window have been separated from ads actually launched for the season: 2,413 of the 2,923 were genuine seasonal launches, and the rest were always on creative that happened to still be delivering.

The offer register: every offer each brand ran, and when

This is the part worth keeping. Every distinct offer we could find in the Q4 ad copy, per brand, with the dates it was live and how many ads carried it. Brands that held the line are listed first, because for a brand deciding its first Black Friday the ones that did not discount are the more instructive evidence.

Two things to read carefully. First, standing terms have been separated from campaigns. Boden ran free shipping and free returns across 928 ads with identical counts, which is delivery boilerplate baked into a product feed template, not a Black Friday offer. Counting it would have made Boden look 93% promotional when the real campaign figure is 33%. Second, some discounts marked always on are not seasonal at all: Wild Nutrition's 50% off ran across 145 ads over 390 days, which is a first order acquisition offer wearing a sale's clothing, and Rise & Fall's 20% off ran for 188 days across 468 ads. When the discount never stops, Black Friday stops being an event.

The mechanics themselves are narrow. Nine of eleven brands used a straight percentage off. Only four touched gift with purchase, and only Rise & Fall used it properly, offering a free hand crafted wax candle worth £30 alongside £20 off a duvet set. Only two brands used early access. Nobody in this set ran a tiered gift ladder.

The wider quarter: how they advertise, and what the winning copy actually said

Across the full quarter the set splits into two operating models. Boden and Rise & Fall are batch launchers, pushing thousands of ads with short individual lifespans: Boden's median ad ran nine days, Rise & Fall's twenty three. At the other end, Pooky and Wild Nutrition run far fewer ads for far longer, with median lifespans of 55 and 70 days. A long running ad is not automatically a better ad, because longevity blends creative quality with retargeting budget and catalogue automation, but a brand whose median ad dies in nine days is buying reach, not building meaning.

Reading the most durable seasonal ads from each brand, four messaging patterns carry the quarter. Review counts as the whole proposition: Piglet in Bed's longest running ads lead on Over 9,000 5 star reviews and almost nothing else. Product mechanism as the hook: Rise & Fall's most relayered line is Tired of your sheet popping off your bed, followed by a claim of 15x the grip of a normal fitted sheet. Press quotation as positioning: Rise & Fall again, with Rise & Fall is still something of an insider secret carried across 21 ad variants. And the wardrobe scenario: With Nothing Underneath runs 9am meeting, 9pm martini and Monday's meeting? Saturday's brunch?, selling versatility rather than product.

What almost nobody does is sell the gift. Given that gift givers are 40 to 50% of Little H&H's expected revenue, it is worth noting that across 66 top seasonal ads in this set, hardly any are cast or written for someone buying for another person. Beaufort & Blake's Step into Christmas in effortless style is about as close as the set gets. The gift giver, the grandparent, the godparent, is a lane this competitive set leaves almost entirely open.

Format mix matters for the shoot. Rise & Fall and Wild Nutrition are video led, at 66% and 51% of ads respectively. Boden is the outlier in the other direction, with 1,044 of its 1,266 ads static, almost all catalogue automation. If Only If runs the highest video share at 71% off the smallest budget in the set, which suggests video is not the expensive option it is often assumed to be.

The coverage table below is deliberately unflattering. It shows what we retrieved against what Meta reported for each brand, because a thin pull should never be mistaken for a complete one.

Whitelisting: creator run ads last nearly four times longer, and there are two different games being played

This is the clearest actionable finding in the report. Across the Q4 2025 population, ads running under a creator byline stayed live a median of 52 days against 14 days for ads running from the brand's own page. That is the one durability comparison available that is not circular, because it compares creator against brand inside the same advertiser accounts, on the same budgets, in the same season. Across the quarter and the current live set together, these eleven brands have used 100 distinct creator and publisher pages.

The first thing to understand is that two different tactics are hiding under one label. Boden runs no individual influencers at all: every one of its 31 live creator ads runs through a magazine, namely ELLE, British Vogue, Grazia, Marie Claire and Who What Wear. That is publisher whitelisting, and what it buys is borrowed editorial authority. Rise & Fall is the opposite, running 13 individual creators and no publications, buying borrowed personal trust. Wild Nutrition is the only brand in the set running both. Little H&H can pursue either, but they are different programmes with different contracts, and the brand bible's press and awards ambitions point at the first while its Tier 1 to Tier 3 influencer plan points at the second.

The strongest single piece of evidence for the influencer route is Pooky. Its five most durable Black Friday period ads were every one of them creator run, each live between 87 and 95 days, and they read like genuine creator posts rather than brand copy: this is a no big lights household, and it's officially cosy home season with @pookylights. No brand written Pooky ad from the season comes close to that longevity. For a brand whose entire proposition is atmosphere in a home, handing the camera to someone in their own home is not a media tactic, it is the most credible possible proof.

Scale varies enormously, and the direction of travel matters more than the snapshot. Wild Nutrition ran 35 individual creators across Q4 2025, Pooky 11, Beaufort & Blake and Rise & Fall 4 each. Today Rise & Fall runs 13, having built a roster rather than booking one offs. Most telling of all, ME+EM ran a single creator ad in the whole of Q4 2025 and now runs 12 across 4 creators. The most price disciplined brand in the set, the one that refused to discount at Black Friday, has spent the year buying borrowed trust instead of buying volume. At the other end, Piglet in Bed and If Only If ran no creator bylined ads at all, in the quarter or today, despite Piglet in Bed being the most promotional brand in the set. They are buying discount where others are buying credibility.

Whitelisting is also not a Black Friday tactic here. Only around 4% of the ads live during the Black Friday window came from a creator byline. Creator content is being used as always on prospecting, not seasonal promotion, which matters for sequencing: the relationships have to exist before the season, because nobody in this data successfully spun one up during it.

The detection is Meta's own rendering: a partnership ad carries a byline reading one party with the other. Note that the brand can sit on either side of that word, so the creator is whichever party is not the brand. Note also the limit of the method: it finds ads a creator is credited on, and cannot see a brand running creator footage from its own page.

Running no creator ads at all right now: Pooky, Piglet in Bed, If Only If.

What Little Hyde & Hare should do

Little H&H is eight weeks into trading and about ten weeks from its first Black Friday. The brand bible already commits to a tiered gift with purchase, explicitly to add value without setting a discount expectation, and to negotiating whitelisting rights in every Tier 1 and Tier 2 contract. This data supports both of those decisions and sharpens them.

1. Do not run a percentage discount this Black Friday

   The three brands in this set that hold price are the three closest to Little H&H in positioning, and they lose nothing visible by sitting it out. A first Black Friday sets the reference price for every subsequent one, and a brand selling a £130 pram liner and a £245 footmuff to gift givers cannot easily walk a discount back. The gift giver is buying a thing that looks expensive; a discount sticker actively works against that.

   Evidence: ME+EM ran zero offer ads in the window and opened at up to 50% off on 17 December, and has since moved spend into creators, from 1 creator ad in Q4 2025 to 12 today. With Nothing Underneath carried offer language on 1% of 380 Q4 ads. Sezane ran no percentage discount in the quarter.

2. Run the booties gift with purchase instead, and put the value in the copy

   Gift with purchase is the open lane. Only Rise & Fall used it seriously in the whole set, and the way it did so is the model: it named the item and stated the worth, offering a free hand crafted wax candle worth £30. The brand bible's tiered ladder, from cashmere socks up to the Woollen Tiny Booties on qualifying orders, is a stronger mechanic than anything else in this data, and nobody in the competitive set is running a tiered ladder at all.

   Evidence: Only four of eleven brands used gift with purchase, and only Rise & Fall ran it at volume, across 7 ads from 23 September. No brand in the set ran a tiered gift ladder.

3. Copy Organic Zoo's framing, not its discount

   Organic Zoo ran a real discount but almost never said the number: twenty five ads carried Black Friday branding and two mentioned the depth. If Little H&H does decide it needs a seasonal moment, that is how to do it without becoming a sale brand. Name the moment in brand voice, let the offer sit behind it, and keep the creative indistinguishable from the rest of the year's work.

   Evidence: Organic Zoo Black Friday creative ran 21 November to 2 December 2025: Black Friday with feeling, and Black Friday the Organic Zoo way.

4. Cast the gift giver, because nobody else is

   Gift givers are 40 to 50% of expected revenue and they are close to invisible in this competitive set. Across the 66 most durable seasonal ads we read, almost none are written or cast for someone buying for another person's baby. Everything is addressed to the end user. A grandparent choosing a first Christmas present, a godparent who wants the unboxing to land, an aunt who wants to be the one who gave the good thing: that is an open lane at exactly the moment of year when it is most valuable, and it needs no discount to work.

   Evidence: 66 top seasonal ads across eleven brands, with gift giver casting essentially absent. Beaufort & Blake's Step into Christmas in effortless style is the nearest the set comes.

5. Use the season to build the list, the way If Only If does

   If Only If turned rarely discounting into the offer itself, promoting an End of Line Sale with the line We go on sale very rarely, sign up to receive early access. That mechanic fits Little H&H exactly: it converts scarcity of discount into an email capture, it rewards the Founding Member list already being built, and it gives the brand a Black Friday presence without a Black Friday price. Only two brands in the set used early access at all.

   Evidence: If Only If ran 12 early access ads from 17 November 2025 to 6 January 2026, alongside a 10% first order incentive across 13 ads.

6. Sign the creator deals now, not in November

   Creator run ads last nearly four times longer than brand run ads in this data, and only about 4% of Black Friday window ads came from creator bylines, which means these relationships are built in the off season and harvested later. The brand bible already requires whitelisting rights in all Tier 1 and Tier 2 contracts. The thing to add is timing: the content needs to be live and proven before the season, because no brand in this set successfully started whitelisting during it.

   Evidence: Creator bylined ads ran a median 52 days against 14 for brand bylined, across 226 creator ads and 100 distinct creator pages. Wild Nutrition ran 35 creators in Q4; Piglet in Bed and If Only If ran none.

7. Run both whitelisting lanes, and copy Rise & Fall's roster building

   Wild Nutrition is the only brand running individual creators and publications side by side, and it is the deepest programme in the set at 35 creators across the quarter. Rise & Fall shows the growth path: it ran 4 creators in Q4 2025 and has 13 live today, building a roster rather than booking one offs. Boden shows the other lane entirely, running its whole creator budget through ELLE, Vogue, Grazia, Marie Claire and Who What Wear, which is a route Little H&H's press ambitions make available and which no other brand in this set is using.

   Evidence: Boden: 31 creator ads, 5 publications, 0 individuals. Rise & Fall: 4 individuals in Q4, 13 live now. Wild Nutrition: 35 individuals plus 1 publication in Q4.

Methodology, and what this data cannot tell you

Every ad here was read from Meta's public Ad Library for Great Britain, scoped to each brand's own Page, with inactive ads included and the delivery window bounded to 1 October to 31 December 2025. Meta retains ended ads for advertisers delivering to the UK and EU, which is what makes a lookback at a season that finished nine months ago possible at all. It will not stay possible: retention runs about a year, so these November 2025 ads begin dropping out of the archive around November 2026.

The Black Friday cut is computed from each ad's parsed flight dates rather than from the search filter, because the Ad Library's date filter matches delivery overlap and is approximate. Ads that merely overlapped the window are reported separately from ads launched for the season.

What this data cannot tell you. The UK Ad Library publishes no impressions, no spend and no landing page URLs for commercial ads. Days live multiplied by variant count is the only performance proxy available, and it conflates creative quality with retargeting budget and catalogue automation, so a long running ad is often a product feed entry rather than a hero film. Offer depth is taken from ad copy, so an offer that ran only on site and was never mentioned in an ad is invisible here. Creator detection finds ads a creator is credited on and cannot see brand run ads using creator footage.

One collection note, recorded because it affects how much you should trust the numbers. Partway through the run Meta soft blocked us, and under throttling it serves a page that echoes the search filters back correctly but contains no ads and no result count. Seven ME+EM windows and three Wild Nutrition windows were initially written down as zero when the truth was that they could not be read. Both brands were re-harvested after the block cleared, recovering ME+EM from 50 ads to 331 and Wild Nutrition from 861 to 1,202. Every figure in this report comes from the corrected pull, and windows that genuinely could not be read are recorded as unknown rather than as zero.

A second correction worth recording. Meta writes a partnership byline as one party with the other, and the brand can appear on either side: ELLE with Boden, but also Beaufort & Blake with Scarlet Martin. An initial pass that always took the first half produced the brand as its own creator on every brand first byline, which understated Beaufort & Blake as running a single creator when it actually runs four. All creator figures here come from the corrected attribution, which treats whichever party is not the brand as the creator.

Overall coverage: 7,072 ads retrieved against roughly 7,600 reported by Meta across the eleven brands, or about 93%. Per-brand coverage is in the table above. Capped brands were sampled evenly across October, November and December rather than drained in date order.