Every year the same thing happens. The lawn collection arrives from the mill, the team rushes a shoot, ads go live a few days after launch, and by the time they are working properly the competition has already taken the early buyers. Then the store spends the rest of the season discounting.
Lawn season rewards the brands that plan backwards from their launch date. This article sets out a simple timeline you can adapt. The dates are examples. Use your own launch date and work back from it.
Eight weeks out: decide what you are selling
Before anything else, decide which pieces in the collection you will push hardest. Most lawn collections have a few designs that will carry the season. Pick them early, based on last year's sales and what your customers asked for.
Choose the hero pieces for ads.
Agree prices and any launch offer now, not the night before.
Confirm stock quantities for the hero pieces with the mill or supplier.
Six weeks out: plan the shoot
Book the shoot for when you will have finished samples, not the final stock. Plan for more short videos than you think you need. Lawn ads tire quickly because customers see a lot of them in a short time.
For each hero piece, plan a few different angles: a styled shot, a plain daylight shot showing the true colour, a close-up of the print and fabric, and a short video of someone wearing it. The plain daylight shots matter more than they seem. They reduce refusals at the door because the customer knows what they are getting.
Four weeks out: build the audiences
Your best early buyers are people who bought from you last season. Make sure you can reach them before launch.
Upload your past customer list to the ad platforms, with permission and in line with each platform's rules.
Build a list of people who visited your site or engaged with your page in the last few months.
Prepare a WhatsApp message for past customers announcing the date, with an option to be notified first.
Three weeks out: start warming up
Run a small budget of teaser content to the audiences above. Show fabric details, behind-the-scenes from the shoot, and the launch date. You are not selling yet. You are making sure that when you do sell, the people most likely to buy have already seen you.
Two weeks out: test the ads
Put the actual launch ads in front of small audiences with a small budget. You are looking for which creative people stop for, not for sales. By launch day you want to know which three or four ads to put most of your budget behind.
Launch week
Go live with the ads that tested best. Send the WhatsApp message to past customers on the morning of launch. Watch stock on the hero pieces closely. If a design is selling out, move ad budget to the next piece rather than taking orders you cannot fill.
Make sure your order confirmation and packing team are ready for the volume. Launch week is when slow confirmation and late dispatch do the most damage, because customers have many other brands to choose from.
Weeks two to six
Refresh creative every week or so. Retire ads that have stopped working. Use the size and colour data from the first week to decide what to reorder or reshoot. Keep checking which campaigns bring orders that are actually paid for, not just placed.
Keep confirmation and dispatch ahead of the ads
The busiest week of lawn season is when operations break. Before launch, check how many orders your team can confirm and pack in a day, and set your ad budget so that orders do not pile up beyond that. A three-day backlog in launch week undoes much of the work you did on the ads, because customers who wait start to cancel.
If you expect launch volume well beyond a normal week, arrange extra hands for confirmation calls and packing in advance, agree a later pickup time with your courier, and prepare packaging the week before. Small preparations like these are what let a launch stay profitable when orders arrive faster than usual.
Plan for sizes and colours
Lawn is usually sold unstitched, but ready-to-wear pieces in the same collection bring size questions. Put a clear size guide next to every stitched piece and answer size questions on WhatsApp quickly. A wrong size is one of the easiest refusals to prevent.
After the season
Write down what worked while it is fresh. Which pieces sold, which ads worked, what the return rate was, what you would change. Next year's plan starts here.
The short version
Pick your hero pieces early, shoot more short video than you think you need, warm up your past customers before launch, test ads in the two weeks before, and be ready to move budget when stock runs out. Our drop planner will build a dated version of this timeline from your own launch date.