As I am sure anyone who works in retail will tell you, Black Friday is an exciting but busy time! Black Friday weekend is the biggest weekend of the year for boots.com – we anticipate it being really busy throughout the whole weekend.

At Boots, both our stores and boots.com have been busy throughout November with our customers using Black Friday deals to kick start their Christmas shopping. In fact, on boots.com we had our biggest sales day of the year (so far!) earlier in the month, as customers took advantage of the great offers we have across the site, including discounts across electrical beauty, fragrance, premium beauty and seasonal gifts. We have also been offering tiered points events for Boots Advantage Card members and exclusive Dyson flash sales which we know our customers are loving.

Convenience and ease of shopping is paramount at this time of year, and my team and I have been working hard behind the scenes for months to make it easier for customers to shop with us online. We’ve updated the site to introduce quicker ways to add to basket and new secure express payment methods. We have also bought in a shelf barcode scanner to enhance the instore experience so customers can scan shelves using their phone to find out more information or order a product online. It’s particularly useful if a line is temporarily out of stock in store – customers can order it online instantly!

From a convenience point of view, Click and Collect is also a great way to shop over Black Friday, with customers able to buy online for delivery to their local store, from the very next day. Plus, we offer super-fast deliveries via Deliveroo and Uber Eats, helping customers to receive their orders in as little as 20 minutes.

Speaking of our stores, our store colleagues will also be very busy over the Black Friday weekend. We know that customers really love seeing what deals we have on offer and the excitement creates a real buzz!

All in all, Black Friday is a huge team effort. It takes collaboration across many teams to ensure we’re ready with everyone working really hard to make sure that we can offer the best possible range, lots of amazing deals and great service to our customers. My team are in at 3am on Black Friday getting the deals live and ready for the big email push!

Our IT team do an amazing job in getting the site stable and ready for the increased volume of traffic that we expect over the Black Friday weekend. They closely monitor both online and store throughout the weekend from our Mission Control Room.

And let’s not forget our colleagues in the warehouse and hybrid stores who work tirelessly to pick and pack the boots.com orders.

I’m really excited about Black Friday this year and I really hope that people will enjoy shopping with us.