What Nobody Tells You About Selling a Seasonal Product

When we launched our first Kindly Woven blankets in August 2025, we unknowingly did ourselves a huge favor. We launched right as blanket season was beginning.

For the next several months, blankets sold, and sold, and sold. We were focused heavily on wholesale, with some direct-to-consumer sales mixed in, and there was enough activity that we thought we had a pretty good understanding of the rhythm of the business.

Then we got to February and March, and things slowed, and then April, where things got quiet. Really quiet. 

And by quiet, we mean, nada.

Of course we knew blankets were seasonal. What we hadn't fully understood was that selling a seasonal product and building a sustainable business around one are two different things.

The sales slowed down, but the expenses didn't. We still had inventory. We still had bills. We still had plans for what we wanted to do next. Money got tight, and waiting around for blanket season to come back wasn't much of a strategy.

The slow season changed how we sold

We started reaching out to retailers much more aggressively.

Before that, we'd been a little hesitant about pitching. How often should we follow up? Were we approaching the right stores? How much was too much?

Once sales slowed, we didn't have the luxury of overthinking every email. We needed to get better at selling.

The more retailers we contacted, the more comfortable we became approaching them. We learned how to start conversations and when to follow up. More importantly, we learned how much there was to gain from simply talking to the people on the other side of the wholesale relationship.

Retailers think about products differently than we do in the studio. They're thinking about their customers, what belongs together in their assortment, what moves, what doesn't, and what makes sense for their particular store.

Those conversations gave us a much better understanding of the market than we had when we launched.

We started listening differently

Before our first slow season, we were mostly thinking about how to get our blankets into more stores.

The more retailers we talked to, the more that thinking expanded.

We started hearing what they were looking for. We learned where they saw opportunities in their stores and what their customers were responding to. Sometimes a conversation confirmed something we already suspected. Other times, it sent us in a direction we hadn't considered at all.

Eventually, those conversations started influencing what we wanted to make next. Some of that thinking has gone into Kindly Studio, a new line we're developing with what we've learned from retailers in mind.

We're not sure we would have gotten there as quickly if the blankets had simply kept selling.

Seasonality is about more than sales

It's easy to think of seasonality as a sales forecast. These months will be busy. These months will be slow. But when you're building a product business, the quiet months affect much more than the numbers coming in.

They change what you work on. They make you look harder at how you're selling. They can expose the parts of the business you've been avoiding because things were going well enough that you didn't have to deal with them yet.

For surface pattern designers thinking about moving into physical products, that's worth considering before you launch. You're not just deciding what to make. You're entering a market with its own buying cycles and quiet stretches, and some of those things are hard to understand until you've actually lived through a year of selling.

Our first slow season was stressful. There's no point in rewriting it now as some wonderful business lesson. Money was tight, and we would have much preferred that the blankets kept selling.

But the quiet made us pay closer attention. We talked to more retailers, got much better at selling and started understanding the market around our products in a way we hadn't before.

We went into the slow season trying to figure out how to sell more of what we had.

We came out of it with a better idea of what we needed to make next, to better serve our customers.

Building a product business has taught us plenty of lessons we never could have planned for. If you’re interested in more behind-the-scenes insights on manufacturing, selling, and building a textile business, sign up for the Kindly Woven newsletter below.