Believe it or not, fall shopping deals are already here, and this year could well be the one that establishes early summer as a key kickoff for both fall and winter holiday shopping.
Back-to-school shopping, per Gartner, began as early as Memorial Day weekend. According to Kassi Socha, director analyst at Gartner, a few sales at major mass retailers such as Wayfair, Target, Walmart, Nordstrom, and Amazon, created space for new inventory that’s typically brought in for fall. “It wasn’t just a clearance,” Socha told Retail Brew. Retailers are preparing earlier than they have in past seasons for back to school, Socha added. According to Wayfair Head of Marketing Campaign and Content Planning Jesse Kiel, the furniture retailer expects back-to-school traffic to “start building in June, with peak traffic typically running from late June through mid-August,” Kiel wrote in an email.
But with a 90-day pause on the steepest tariffs on China, water filtration brand Hydros, which sells pitchers and bottles shipped from China, is fast tracking its strategies to get the most out of this big sales event. Hydros’s founder and CEO Winston Ibrahim told Retail Brew he is rushing to get everything in order before back-to-school season. “We’re getting ready for some aggressive promotions for Amazon Prime Day,” Ibrahim said. “We normally see a fusion of back to school selling periods where it starts with Amazon Prime Day, and it goes for another couple of weeks after that, then, into the, say, middle part of August.”
“We placed an order in the last couple of days with our manufacturers in Asia to top off some inventory,” Ibrahim said. “We’re sprinting right now to put everything together that we need to execute for Prime Day, including offering some pretty compelling discounts. But we’re kind of scrambling right now to do that to make sure we hit all the cutoffs.”
Ibrahim said this back-to-school season will stand out because it’s going to be very value focused. “We think that consumers are really going to concentrate where they can get the most value, and Amazon is already a closed ecosystem where consumers are used to shopping for value,” he added.
Last year, consumers shopped for inexpensive items on Amazon, as parents prioritized essentials over dorm-room indulgences.
Ibrahim expects that shoppers will want to spend money on items that can save them money, and so Hydros is planning to launch new products that are “more stripped down and have even lower price points” later in the year.
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At a time when brands and retailers are contemplating raising prices, Winston is able to power through plans to launch new low cost pitchers because he stockpiled a year’s worth of raw materials from China before the 2024 US presidential election.
Due to tariff-related uncertainty, Hydros has had to table its expansion plans. The brand has been operating with minimal staff (just four people) and zero advertising, and clocked 10% organic sales growth through competitive pricing.
Winston added that Hydros has also streamlined its customer base, dropping smaller local retailers to focus on select mid-sized grocery chains and Amazon. Hydros is also laser focused on selling items that are best-sellers and plans on slashing other SKUs for the first time this year.
“We are cutting things that, even if they sold decently, we’re not prioritizing them,” Ibrahim said. “We’re going to sell through that inventory and not reorder and focus on the things that have been the clearest, most consistent winners.”
The back-to-school shopping season ranks as retail’s second-largest sales period behind the holiday season. According to eMarketer, back-to-school sales are expected to cool down for a second consecutive year, matching the overall slowdown in the pace of retail growth.
Regardless of a potential slump, back-to-school shopping is expected to be the first major shopping period to be impacted by tariff trade tensions, with Bloomberg reporting in April that cargo shipments from China to the US have already plummeted by up to 60%, potentially leading to inventory shortages.
However, going into the summer, Socha said the big message is “retailers should be prepared to adapt and respond earlier to mass retail summer sales than they ever have before.”
“Over the last few years, we’ve seen holiday move to fall and now I think we’ll see fall move to summer,” Socha said. “Consumers have an appetite for earlier sales given the current zeitgeist of conversation around tariffs and price increases and changes, consumers are looking for the best discount, the best sale, the best value when they’re spending their limited discretionary spending.”
“As we head towards back to school, I think you’re going to see a key group of consumers looking for the best price at the best time, in an earlier time frame,” she added.