By November, we’re opening our laptops before we’ve properly opened our eyes. Up before the sun. Coffee in hand. Brains not yet officially participating. How are sales looking? What happened overnight? Is anything broken?
Hours later, that first coffee is still sitting there.
Cold.
I’m Tonya, Tweedmaker’s operations manager and sizing expert. Welcome to Black Friday season.
Black Friday, from our side of the screen
It starts months before the first sale email: offers, prices, fabrics, production, ads, emails and website updates. All alongside the day-to-day business.
Then November arrives.
One offer ends. Another starts. Deeper discounts. New deadlines. Has that code been tested? Why is the old offer still showing?
An email is about to go out. Someone spots a mistake.
Hang on. Stop. Has it sent yet?
Meanwhile, orders are coming in. Customers need help. Measurements need checking. Something glitches.
It worked when we tested it. Of course it did.
SOS. Can you look at this?
Ryan, Tweedmaker’s owner, is in the USA. I’m across the Atlantic. Production has its own working hours. Someone’s day is starting as someone else’s should be ending, so the laptops stay open.
Dinner beside the computer. We’ll finish after this last thing.
Three hours later, we’re still there.
Seven days a week, right through until we close in December. Up before daylight, working late - and sometimes wide awake at three in the morning, checking in because sleep just won’t come.
With so much of the year riding on those weeks, switching off becomes a skill we seem to have misplaced.
What harm could possibly come from that?
Two years ago, my son Jack was thirteen. Somewhere in this seasonal madness, he asked to borrow my laptop.
Of course he could.
The following morning, I stumbled out of bed, collected my coffee and opened it to check in on Tweed World.
Eyes barely open. Coffee in hand. Brains not yet intact.
I opened Shopify.
Nicolas Cage.
I looked at the live website.
Nicolas Cage.
Our actual product images. Where actual customers were shopping.
I checked the ads.
NICOLAS CAGE.
Social media?
You will be astonished to learn: Nicolas Cage.
I kept opening things, searching for something reassuring.
Another page. Another product. Another Nicolas Cage.
My eyes were fully open at this point.
My brain, unfortunately, had gone straight to:
WE HAVE BEEN HACKED.
It was 1 a.m. in America
Ryan was asleep.
Ryan was about to have a very unpleasant awakening.
I started blasting messages.
SOS! FIRE! HELP!
"We’ve been hacked. It’s everywhere. The website. The ads. The socials."
No answer.
I moved on to his mobile. More messages. Still nothing.
Meanwhile, I was jumping between tabs, which only provided further opportunities to encounter Nicolas Cage.
Were customers seeing this? What else had been changed? How were we going to fix it?
And why wasn’t Ryan answering his bloody messages?
Because it was one in the morning, Tonya.
So I called him.
To tell him that, in the middle of Black Friday sales, our entire business appeared to have become a Nicolas Cage tribute act.
There are probably gentler ways to wake a business owner.
I cannot currently think of a worse one.
Then something dawned on me
Somewhere in the panic, I Googled what I was seeing.
And there it was.
A prank that replaces the images you see in your browser.
On your laptop.
The laptop your thirteen-year-old son borrowed yesterday.
Oh my God.
Jack.
What have you done?
The website was fine. So were the ads and our social accounts.
Our customers were shopping quite normally while I was trying to raise an international incident.
I had woken the owner of the company at one in the morning because my child had filled my laptop with Nicolas Cage.
Imagine Ryan processing that update.
Almost funny.
Not quite yet.
An apology, with some giggling
Jack sent Ryan an apology by email.
He was truly sorry. He’d meant to prank his mother and had accidentally caused a near-death experience for two people during Black Friday.
He hadn’t factored in the sleep deprivation. The pressure. The coffee that hadn’t kicked in. His mother’s ability to go from half asleep to international crisis management in thirty seconds.
He also couldn’t quite stop giggling.
I would love to tell you I handled that with grace.
I needed a moment.
Two years later, we’ve given him Instagram
Jack is fifteen now.
He’s joining us for a week of secondary school work experience.
Doing our Instagram posts.
Yes. We have heard ourselves say that out loud.
The boy who once made us believe every image in the business had been compromised is now being trusted to help create them.
You can see what Jack gets up to on our Instagram.
We laugh about it now. But I remember the exhaustion just as clearly as the panic - and not one of us can watch a Nicolas Cage movie without an initial shudder.
There’s a reason we close for ten days in December. After weeks of early starts, late finishes and being permanently on call, we need to stop.
Sleep properly. Eat dinner without a screen beside the plate. Spend time with the families who’ve heard “just five more minutes” far too often.
That break matters. But we’d quite like to reach it with something left in the tank.
A different kind of November
For a small business like Tweedmaker, Black Friday is an important part of the trading year. We rely on the orders this season brings, and we know plenty of you look forward to a good offer.
We’re just done with the Black Friday circus.
This year, we’re doing it a different way.
A little more breathing room would suit all of us.
Especially Ryan at one in the morning.
Tonya from Tweedmaker
P.S. If you spot Nicolas Cage on our Instagram, please send an SOS.