When should I start my Christmas collection?

Thursday 17 September 2026, and there's proper maths behind that rather than a coach's hunch. Count 45 days forward from 17 September and you land on Sunday 1 November, which gives you a launch weekend with the whole of November and the first half of December still in front of you to sell into. The 45 days is the part that surprises people, and probably not in the way you're expecting, because it was never really about starting the making earlier.

I sold on Etsy for years myself. Quilts and bags made from cotton I imported from America, glitter hairbows before that when there was no money coming in and going back to work early was the alternative, feathers on eBay in my late teens if you go right back far enough. My best weekend as a maker was a Christmas launch, and I'll show you what actually sat underneath it further down, because the date only makes sense once you've seen it.

Why 17 September specifically?

Because a launch needs a runway, and 45 days is the runway. Start on Thursday 17 September and the end of it lands on Sunday 1 November, a weekend, when people are at home with a cup of tea and their phone rather than half-reading on a lunch break. And crucially, every serious Christmas shopping week still sits ahead of you at that point.

Now run the version most of us actually do, because I did it myself for years. You spend September and October making, since making feels like progress and there's always one more thing the collection needs, and the shop finally looks properly full somewhere around 1 December. Then you launch into the quiet half of Christmas, the half where the organised shoppers have already spent their money, and you launch cold.

Cold is worth being precise about. A cold launch means nobody knew it was coming, and it has nothing to do with how good the work is. A full shop and an empty order book can live side by side quite happily, and for a lot of makers they do, every single December.

Isn't September too early to be thinking about Christmas?

If you make things for a living, you were almost certainly going to start making in September anyway, so the honest question was never whether to start then. The question is what those weeks are actually for.

We're taught that being ready to sell means having the stock. Made, photographed, listed, done. But have you considered that for a launch, ready mostly means people knowing it's coming?

That's the belief hiding under nearly every disappointing December I hear about. The maker did everything she was told to do, worked every evening through the autumn, filled the shop... and the shop sat there waiting to be found by strangers, because being found by strangers is the only move a listing has.

I have the expensive proof of the other way round. One Christmas the launch did not land, and I spent Boxing Day back at the cutting table, marking fabric down to shift it, because a collection nobody was waiting for does not politely disappear in January. It becomes a discount sale you run while you should be somewhere else entirely. My son had been born that same December. The lost margin was not really the cost.

What am I actually meant to do for those 45 days?

Not 45 days of making, and that misreading eats whole autumns, mine included.

The 45 days is a runway with the making as one stretch of it. It starts with setting the date, actually in the diary, because without a date there's nothing for anyone to look forward to, including you. Then deciding what you're launching, as a collection rather than a trickle, a set of pieces that belong together and can arrive together like an event does.

Then yes, building the collection. Your hands at the table, the bit you'd have done anyway.

But while the making happens, two quieter things run alongside it, and these are the ones that do the selling. You grow the list of people who've asked to hear from you, and you let them watch the collection come to life. The fabric arriving, the half-finished thing on the table, a little sample slipped into a parcel you were posting anyway. During those weeks you aren't selling anything yet, just making people want something before they can have it.

Then launch week, where you press send.

My £12,000 Christmas weekend was exactly this, and I won't give you the number without what sat under it. 6 weeks of teasing the new collection to my list, showing fabrics as they arrived, slipping samples into orders that were already going out the door, and then one email on launch weekend. By the Sunday morning nobody was discovering that collection, they were just waiting for it, and the email told them the doors were open.

What if I've already missed 17 September?

Then the runway compresses before it disappears, so don't write the year off. Count 45 days forward from whatever today is, and if that still lands with a few proper selling weeks left before Christmas, you have a launch.

If the sums are tighter than that, shorten the runway rather than skipping bits of it, and be careful which bits you cut. The phase everyone drops first is the anticipation, because it doesn't feel like work the way making does, and it's the only phase that was ever doing the selling. Even a couple of weeks of showing people what's coming beats a full shop that nobody knew about, and I'd take a small warm launch over a big cold one every time.

And if it's genuinely too late this year, the kindest thing I can tell you is that the people who buy from you this Christmas are next year's runway. Invite them onto your list now, while they love what arrived in the post, and next September you're starting the 45 days with an audience instead of a search box.

How you grow that list in the first place, and what you actually send so 6 weeks of teasing never tips into 6 weeks of selling, is more than one post can hold.

The launch planner is built around this exact runway, because knowing the date is one thing and knowing what today's job is turns out to be quite another. Put your launch day into it and it hands back the six weeks in front of it with the one job for each week, so the anticipation actually gets built instead of being the thing you meant to do while you were at the table making. It costs nothing and there's nothing to log into, and if you would rather not run those six weeks on your own, the Handmade Launch Sprint is the same weeks with me in them.

The stock was never the hard part, you were always going to make the stock. The 45 days are for making the wanting