Black Friday -Behind The Scenes

Just as you would imagine for any business, Black Friday is the epitome of chaos, as well as great deals. For months prior to the event, up to, during, and even after Black Friday, we at ZZPerformance were hard at work, ordering products, fabricating products, processing orders, helping customers, maintaining and updating the website, packing products, and getting them shipped as quickly and efficiently as possible. There really is a lot that goes into an event this large, it takes a lot of preparation, team work, patience, and experience to make this happen, and we’d like to give you an inside look at how we did it this year.

The whole conversation for this event started months ahead of time, around the beginning of September. We were gathering ideas of what we should be doing to get a jump start on the holiday. This took the shape of several meetings and discussions loosely made up of marketing ideas, key products to put on sale, and how to improve upon the event this year. At this point, we started to formulate a plan. Lists of sale products were slowly growing, marketing emails and campaigns were being created, extension and software updates for the website were being rolled out, and our fabrication team was hard at work preparing mass quantities of products for the event.

This is only a portion of the products shipped!	Tim getting ready to flash the first group of what will total around 100 PCMs!

By the time October came around, a lot was discussed and our vision of the event was starting to unfold. At this time, like every year, we had a large order of components on its way to us. This meant we had a large semi-trailer full of boxes that needed to be unloaded, which we use as a sort of team building exercise. Everyone at ZZP gathered to unload this truck, and it wasn’t a small order by any means. You can literally imagine a semi-trailer packed from floor to ceiling, front to back, with boxes upon boxes. The task at first, seemed daunting, but we worked as a team and box by box we unloaded that trailer.

After that, time started to fly by, and as we quickly approached November; we had entered a crunch period. It almost seemed as if no amount of preparation would be enough to get us to where we needed to be for the weekend of Black Friday. We faced one issue after another, with last minute website updates, and the unknowing of whether certain components for our products would arrive on time, and not to mention a last minute server change to handle the amount of traffic we were expecting. But for every issue we ran into coming into the sale weekend, we combated with our own solutions, and made it work.

Shipping department working hard to get all orders out fast and efficiently!

The moment right before the event had started was nerve-wracking, yet exciting. All of ZZP’s hard work had built up to this, and it was thrilling to watch our active users jump from 100 to 200, 200 to 300 and so on. However, as we climbed in active users, we faced more problems with our server and website, which called for some quick actions and fixes to get the site in a stable condition. However, once the site was stabilized, it wasn’t quite smooth sailing. From there we worked hard to accommodate our customer’s questions, process their orders, and get the products packaged and shipped as quickly as possible. A lot of the ZZP team worked well after business hours and throughout the weekend to keep up with the number of orders coming through. It really was a sight to see, as we all worked together to make Black Friday go over as smoothly as possible. 

We at ZZPerformance hope that you, the customer, were able to participate with us in this chaotic and exciting event, and were able to capitalize on some of the great deals we offered, which really brought a new meaning to our slogan “go fast, not broke”. And if you didn’t, well we hope to see you for Black Friday in 2017!

Working late to get orders out on time!