Digitally native jewelry retailer Luca + Danni generated record sales on Nov. 11, which is both the ecommerce sales event Singles Day and Veterans Day. The retailer declined to share specific figures.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. invented the Singles Day shopping event in 2009 to encourage consumers who were not in a relationship to embrace a single lifestyle. The sales holiday has grown into the world’s largest online shopping event with Alibaba generating more than 268.4 billion yuan ($38.4 billion) during the 24-hour sale last year.

Given Singles Day‘s timing relatively early in the holiday season, Luca + Danni used the event as a test bed to understand what items it should promote and boost production of throughout the holidays, says David Oksman, the brand’s president. “Singles Day enabled us to read the market, see what products are selling and where we should ramp up inventory,” he says.

The brand’s vertical integration enables it to move from idea to scaled production within 2 weeks. Once a new product is ready, it uses social media ads on Facebook and Instagram to evaluate consumers’ responses to the product.

For example, the retailer, which sells bangles and other assorted jewelry, in the lead up to the holidays developed a number of seasonal bangles including a snowflake, a poinsettia and a candy cane, as well as a Christmas tree featuring crystals that look like ornaments. It then highlighted those specific bangles in social media ads on Singles Day. The response was enlightening; the Christmas tree bangle outsold every other seasonal bangle by at least a two-to-one margin.

Less than a week later, the retailer ramped up production on the Christmas tree bangle and heavily promoted it in its social media ads. By Thanksgiving week, the Christmas tree bangle was one of the retailer’s top-selling products.

“Speed is our superpower,” Oksman says. “Our ability to quickly leverage consumer data enables us to be nimble and proactive.”

That ability was particularly important during the 2019 holiday season given that there were six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2019 compared with 2018. And with Amazon’s rollout of 1-day shipping earlier in the year, a number of consumers waited until later in the season to make their purchases, he says.

Luca + Danni anticipated that shift in consumer behavior and pushed its guaranteed delivery cut-off day to Dec. 19 (and Dec. 20 with express shipping). Moreover, when sales picked up later in mid-December, the retailer was able to dedicate production resources to meet the demand.

“Our approach ensured that we had the right inventory on hand when we saw Black Friday-like sales volume from mid-December until our shipping cut-off dates,” Oksman says.