2024 in Review:
Sales & Product Trends

February 12, 2024

We’ve been publishing aggregate statistics across all our company store platforms for a while now, but this year we thought it’d be fun to dig a little bit deeper into some of the metrics to see what kind of trends we could find. Turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same – while there were a few shifts in the top categories, for instance, apparel is still king in company stores. Nothing surprising there.

2024 was the first year that we saw redemption programs really take off in our system, and since those stores are generally populated with free gifts, the product mix tends to be slightly different. While apparel still ranks high, drinkware eked out a win for redemption programs in 2024. Redemption programs tend to offer items of higher perceived value (as opposed to an advertisement for the company, which wearables often are), so drinkware topped the charts for the second year in a row. Of course, the continued popularity of Stanley and Stanley-adjacent drinkware might have something to do with it.

The Big Numbers

How’d everything go overall in 2024? Pretty good, according to our numbers. Every key metric showed year-over year increases. Measured against the previous year, total system sales and product count increased by over 15%. Total orders were also up slightly, but the most noteworthy change came in average order value, which increased from $123 to $142, a bump of over 15%. Since the total revenue through the system was also up around 15% while the order volume only increased slightly, that means that item prices were likely higher across the board in 2024, which tracks with general consumer sentiment about pricing last year. Perhaps more impressive is that the sales numbers include a much larger base of redemption stores than the previous year, which generally don’t have dollar values associated with products.

We also asked our data nerds to dig up a few more granular numbers to see what they tell us about 2024. For the first time, we’re publishing monthly trends to see where the sales land throughout the year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, December is the worst month, probably because most of the gift giving and holiday programs are mostly fulfilled before the month starts, since the month has the longest holiday stretch.

The champion of months? July, though not by much. June, August and October are all in the ballpark, and even the darkest month (December) is only about 30% lower than July. We’re not really sure what value can be gleaned from monthly numbers other than the third calendar quarter of the year seems to hold the majority of the winners. October still cooks, probably because it continues be the highest profile awareness month (it’s breast cancer awareness month, in case you’ve been under a rock for the last quarter-century).

Random Observations

Sometimes it’s fun to pick a random factoid and see how it changes from year to year. In 2023, the most popular apparel size in our system was medium. In 2024, that changed to large. Are we getting larger? Or is there a conspiracy to make apparel slightly smaller every year? Inquiring minds want to know, but we honestly can’t tell you.

Trying to figure out the most popular payment method can be a little dicey, because our system has so many ways of paying, including custom payment methods that themselves can drive a lot of transaction volume. But in terms of overall volume, the winner is points. Points store transactions tend to be lower value since a user is often redeeming them for a single gift, so it makes sense that there would be more of these than any other single payment method.

The Bitter End