Thanksgiving and preview of our upcoming Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale!

Some of my happiest memories of building Pololu, and therefore of my life, are of my friends Ben and Paul moving to Las Vegas to work on it with me. Ben was my best friend in high school, but we had not stayed in touch well after that. I met Paul at MIT, and he was involved with Pololu from the beginning, in 2000, and after he graduated, he visited Candice and me in Massachusetts and then in Las Vegas from time to time. Ben and I reconnected in late 2006, and he moved to Las Vegas shortly thereafter; Paul finally joined us (with his wife Fang) full time after the summer of 2007.

So we have been at this as a team for over ten years now. It’s long enough that it’s difficult to remember things being different. As I started writing this, I figured that our first Black Friday sale must have been in 2007, too. But apparently we did not have our first one until 2009 (though Ben pointed out, with a hint of resentment, that he might have been pushing for it sooner). I have happy memories of last-minute sale preparations and then staying up past midnight to watch the sales come in, wondering how long the doorbuster deals would last. Some years we were at home, instant-messaging each other; other years, we were at the office making sure everything worked as expected.

Even now, our Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale is probably the project Paul, Ben, and I work on together most intensely. There are of course others involved in getting ready for the sale, and there are lots of other projects the three of us all work on. But there’s a really hard deadline, which we typically do not have to deal with, which leads to late nights together. And preparing for the sale involves deciding which products we care about a lot and that we want to highlight, and since it’s our company, it’s our call on how much we want to push by offering products at or sometimes below cost, in the spirit of not only merchandising but also good fun. It’s a time to look back on the products we have released this year, and, as I am doing now, reminisce about Black Friday sales past.

(We do not recommend actually running a Balboa in the snow.)

I am giving this background not only to share some of what I am thankful for, but to give our customers and newer employees some understanding of our perspective and what goes into these sales. It’s personal. It’s something fun for me, a kind of reversal of the excitement of looking for good deals as a shopper on Black Friday. When I used to be more directly involved in getting things made and shipped, I would usually go to stores in the evening, to see what deals might be left that other shoppers weren’t interested in. In the past few years, I’ve had the luxury of doing some brick and mortar Black Friday shopping in the morning, though usually I’m still shopping for things like vacuum cleaners for Pololu at stores like Home Depot.

We listen to what our customers say, and we try to put something in our deals for everyone. Of course, part of the point is to offer some extreme discounts, so we limit the quantities and the durations on those deals. But we still try to set the limits such that the doorbusters will last at least a few hours, so if you care and try a little, they should be available. If you’re one of those people who don’t like waking up early or sorting through special offers, I remind you that we work hard to offer good prices to begin with, and we are offering discounts site wide for the duration of the sale. And if you are a student or parent who really had your heart set on a Zumo or Balboa robot for Christmas but miss out on the doorbuster for some reason, and that extra discount makes the difference in being able to afford it, let us know. We want deserving people to have these robots, and we’ll try to help you out.

Now, on to details about the sale this year, since we will be making some big changes from years past. In a break from past years, when we had a single set of doorbuster coupons that went active on the first day of the sale and the same items were on sale for the duration of the sale (Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday), we will have different door busters for different days. We have also upgraded our coupon system so that we can control the time they are active, not just the day, so that we can make doorbusters go active at a time more appropriate for our customers in the United States.

Our new free shipping system should allow many of the sale items to ship for free or at a low cost, which should make it practical to make several orders over the course of the sale. We might combine some orders into single shipments to reduce our shipping expenses, but please note that because of the volume of orders we get during the sale, we will not be able to accommodate requests to combine orders to reduce shipping charges.

I hope you get to spend the holidays doing things that bring meaning to your life, with the people you love.

Oh, and if you were expecting to see a preview of the sale, it’s up on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale page now. Keep checking back throughout next week as we reveal more great deals!