After reading all the feedback about our Black Friday 2019 offers, I thought about what could explain the negativity of some posts.

In the lead-up to the holiday season, and we all make wish lists, and if we don't get what we want, it can be disappointing. I think many of us know that feeling if you look under the Christmas tree and the thing you dreamed about is not there. Perhaps this is a similar situation.

What did we do differently compared to recent years? Not much. We always offered just a few products with a decent discount and even announced limited editions (Formula 2018) or new products (McLaren). We don’t encourage customers to wait for Black Friday because we prefer continuous sales and not big peaks.

Where we clearly failed was to manage expectations. And this is the reason for this post; I want to manage the expectations for future Black Fridays.

Future sales will be based on these basic rules:

Fanatec usually does not run sales or special prices throughout the year. There is one day per year when we sell products at a discount, and this is Black Friday.

There will be only one or two products (bundles or individual products) on discount. There will never be a general discount of X% on all products or free shipping. This would just accumulate most sales to this one day and create massive handling and logistic problems.

The discounted products will be popular sellers, but unlikely to be newly launched products or products we’ve had on sale before.

The discount will be significant and in the range of 20% to 30%.

On top of the discounted products, we might sell a limited edition with special colours or better materials like the Shifter with Carbon Fibre knobs this year which als has a price advantage of about 30%.

We might also use Black Friday to launch a new product without discount.

This is how we did it in the past and this is how we want to do it in the future.

Fanatec products usually have a very long life cycle; products like the BMW steering wheel have remained in our portfolio for over eight years. The prices on our products usually only go up over time (due to manufacturing costs and inflation), which means strong used value too. We are not fans of stimulating sales with discounts and we prefer to convince customers with quality, features, functionality, and a strong price-performance ratio. Our general pricing already represents good value due to the fact that we sell directly from our own website instead of retail.

I don't believe in cheap. I believe in value. The craziness around Black Friday does not change our principles.

And please don't get hyped nor disappointed. Buy the things you really enjoy and nothing more.