Black Friday 2026 Has Already Started: 12 Brands Selling Early

Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November. On Meta, it started in September.

Between 1 September and 19 October, 29,672 ads that mention Black Friday in their copy, carousel cards or page name went live on Facebook and Instagram, according to Brandsearch's index of Meta ads. That is about 0.19% of all new Meta ads in the index over those seven weeks, against 0.22% at the same point in 2025: the raw count rose from 22,683, but the index itself grew about 52%. What both years share is the climb: Black Friday's share of new ads rises from under 0.1% in early September to about 0.6% by mid-October.

Here is the other half of the picture, and it matters more. In 2025, the ads launched by 19 October were 1.5% of everything that ran for Black Friday that season. 42% launched in the final week. The brands below are a small, deliberate minority, and what they are doing now, two months out, is not a discount most of the time. It is list-building, price anchoring and "don't wait" arguments that only work before everyone else turns on.

This article covers the early movers of 2026. For what last season looked like once the numbers were final, there is the companion piece: Black Friday ad examples: 20 DTC brands, their reach and estimated spend.

Black Friday's share of new Meta ads, by week, 2025 and 2026

The two years climb the same way, and in five of the seven weeks Black Friday's share of new ads is a little lower in 2026. The last two weeks of 2026 are still being filled in the index, so their values will move. Black Friday 2026 is one day earlier than 2025's, so the two curves line up almost exactly.

The 12 early Black Friday ads

One ad per brand, all launched between 2 September and 17 October 2026, all from ecommerce brands selling to consumers, ranked by the number of people each one has reached in the EU and UK so far.

Together the 12 have reached 2.37 million people in Europe for €24,962 of estimated spend so far.

How to read the numbers

These are running totals, accumulated by 21 October. Several ads are still serving.

Reach is the hard number. Spend is an estimate. EU rules make Meta publish how many people in the EU and UK an ad reached. The spend column is Brandsearch's EU spend figure for each ad, and it tracks reach very closely: eight of these twelve work out at exactly €11.50 per thousand people reached: they are UK-only ads, and €11.50 is the rate Brandsearch applies to UK reach. Read it as a measure of scale, not as an invoice.

Europe only. Nothing comparable is published for the United States. "Last seen" is the last day the ad was recorded serving.

1. Secretlab

See this ad in Brandsearch

The largest early reach in this list, and the most carefully built offer. The headline, in Spanish, reads "Secretlab | Black Friday prices, available now" (translated). The ad sells the MAGNUS Evo standing desk with up to €150 off via a code, and the product cards behind it point to the same page in nine European languages.

The interesting part is in the small print: a price-match guarantee on the listed prices until 4 December. That clause removes the only reason to wait. If the price drops on the day, the customer is covered. Secretlab put roughly €813 a day behind it from 8 to 14 October, seven weeks before Black Friday.

2. Icy Bear Dental

See this ad in Brandsearch

The headline is the whole offer: "Black Friday: £39.99 (Worth £92.96)". The body lists exactly what is in the box (whitening strips, powder, toothpaste and a free pen "worth £14.99"), then the result, "up to 6 shades whiter in 14 days", then the risk reversal: free shipping and a money-back guarantee.

It launched on 18 September, seventy days out, ran until 16 October, and is the biggest spender in the table at €7,248. The landing page is early-black-friday-bundle. A bundle is the safest thing to run this early: it is not on the regular price list, so it does not train customers to wait for a markdown. A second copy of the creative, launched 7 October, reached another 154,360 people.

3. Toddla

See this ad in Brandsearch

The earliest start in the list: 2 September, 86 days out. The headline says "Black Friday Sale LIVE NOW!" and the product is a soft Montessori Christmas tree for toddlers, "no broken ornaments or injuries". The offer is 50% off plus free fairy lights.

The product explains the timing. A Christmas tree has to arrive before the season, and the parents buying it plan in September. Toddla ran the ad for 46 days at around €60 a day: Black Friday as a label for a seasonal launch, with ten weeks of selling before most of its category switched on.

4. Superspace

See this ad in Brandsearch

There is no discount in this ad at all. The copy reads: "👀 Thinking of waiting for Black Friday? Our shelves are usually empty before BFCM even kicks off. 😅 Snag your favourites now before they vanish again."

Superspace treats Black Friday as the objection and answers it with stock. It sells large construction sets for children, a gift category where running out is a real risk, and the ad was still serving on 21 October, at about €126 a day. The date becomes a reason to buy at full price.

5. Bodyform

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Early Black Friday Deals. Shop Up To 60% off* select Period Pants. Whilst stocks last." The discount is in the body. The headline is something else: "Buy Now, Pay Later."

On a product averaging around $23, paying later is not about affordability; it removes hesitation at checkout. The click goes to the outlet collection, which tells you what "select" means: a clearance of specific lines under an early Black Friday banner. 2 to 18 October, about €124 a day.

6. ALOHAS

See this ad in Brandsearch

Eleven words: "Better Than Black Friday. Up to 30% off for a limited time." The landing page is a collection called, literally, better-than-black-friday.

ALOHAS is the largest brand here by Brandsearch's estimate, a Spanish footwear label at roughly $1.9M to $3.4M a month, and it ran this for a single day, 3 October, for €779: a test, not a campaign. Rather than borrow the event, it competes with it.

7. Wahu

See this ad in Brandsearch

The most persuasive copy in this set, in German. It opens like a confession: "We argued about this internally for a long time." Then the claim: the complete Wahu balance-board set is under €100 for the first time, "it has never been this cheap, and it won't be again. Not even on Black Friday." (translated)

Then it stacks reasons to buy now: €184.97 of accessories free, a free video course, 14-day money-back, "this batch only, while stocks last". Where Superspace argues with stock and ALOHAS with a slogan, Wahu makes a price promise against the date itself. The landing page is herbstsale, autumn sale: Black Friday is the comparison, not the promotion.

8. Dermalogica

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Get On The Early Access List." The copy: "Save your place. We'll handle the reminder. Join the waitlist for Dermalogica Black Friday early access." The button is Sign up, and the link opens a sign-up inside Facebook, so the customer never leaves the app.

No product, no discount, no date. Dermalogica spent €848 in five days to collect contacts it can reach in November without paying Meta again. "We'll handle the reminder" frames handing over an email address as a favour to the customer.

9. MAKANI

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Don't wait for Black Friday" is the headline, and the body is the best argument for it in this list: "You make a note of things for 27 November, and by then you've forgotten half of them, or they're gone. 2-for-1 is running now. Same mechanic, same prices. Except the models are still here." (translated from German)

It names the date, concedes the offer is identical to Black Friday's, and argues about availability instead of price. The link text adds "It won't be cheaper on Black Friday". MAKANI sits around €1M a month in Brandsearch's estimate and ran this for one day, 8 October, for €565.

10. Imagin Fires

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Our biggest ever Black Friday sale begins on 1 November. Sign up to get the first pick of our fires." The description field repeats the date: "Sale opens Sunday 1 November".

A teaser with an appointment in it, launched 17 October. Electric fires averaging close to $500 are a considered purchase with a seasonal deadline. Opening on 1 November, almost four weeks out, puts most of the selling before peak-week auction prices.

11. Graham & Green

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Join the G&G mailing list for exclusive early access to the Black Friday Event and discover our offers before anyone else." A video, a sign-up button, a form that stays inside Facebook.

Same mechanic as Dermalogica, different shape: 17 days at about €27 a day, the lowest daily rate in the table. Building a list does not need a burst, and a retailer at roughly £600k to £1.1M a month chose to drip it.

12. VORO

See this ad in Brandsearch

"Pre-Black Friday: Pick three watches. Pay for one. That's the whole offer." (translated from German) You choose three from the collection, pay for the most expensive, and the other two are free.

"Pre-Black Friday" can run from mid-October without promising anything about the day, and "that's the whole offer" is built for a market tired of asterisks. The rest is product facts: 316L steel, two-year warranty, 30-day returns. Launched 16 October, still serving on the 20th. Buy-three triples units per order.

What the early movers have in common

To see the pattern beyond the 12, we classified the 60 highest-reaching Black Friday ads launched since 1 October. After removing non-ecommerce advertisers, duplicate brand records and false matches, 41 ads remained:

Fewer than half are selling on discount. 56% of the early ads either collect contacts, raise the basket with a bundle, or argue against waiting. In October, Black Friday is used more often as a reason to sign up or to buy now at a structured price than as a straight markdown.

A quarter sell nothing yet. Ten of the 41 are early-access lists, waitlists or dated teasers. In the 2025 list, only two of twenty had no offer. This is when they face the least competition for attention.

Multibuys beat percentages for the early slot. Pick 3 pay 1, 2-for-1, buy one get two, a free item worth a stated amount: eight of the 41. A bundle can run in October without cutting the price of anything the customer could buy on its own in November.

The counter-argument has become a format. "Don't wait for Black Friday", "Better Than Black Friday", "not even on Black Friday". It only works before the peak, which is why it runs now.

Payment terms are part of the offer. Bodyform's headline is "Buy Now, Pay Later". A Spanish dropshipping store selling a €29.90 cordless drill leads with "PAGAS CUANDO RICIVES" [sic], you pay when it arrives: cash on delivery. Neither is a discount, and both sit in the headline, where the price usually goes.

Many early bursts are short. Three of the 12 ran one or two days (ALOHAS, MAKANI, Imagin Fires). Early October looks like testing season: a message tried for a few hundred euros before November.

What this means for your Black Friday 2026 calendar

The 2025 curve, built with the same search, shows how late the bulk of the season actually arrives (the index itself grew about 20% between September and December 2025, which slightly favours the later weeks):

Read against Black Friday on 27 November 2026, that suggests four windows:

1. Now to early November: build the list. By 2 November last year, only 6% of the season's Black Friday ads had launched. This is the quietest window to collect sign-ups with an early-access or waitlist ad, the way Dermalogica and Graham & Green did, and it gives you an audience you can reach in November without buying it back from Meta.
2. Late October: put a date on it. A teaser with a specific opening day, like Imagin Fires' "Sale opens Sunday 1 November", turns a vague "coming soon" into an appointment.
3. The first half of November: open early access or a pre-sale. By 16 November last year, less than a third of the season's ads had launched. A bundle or a "Pre-Black Friday" offer in this window sells before the auction gets crowded.
4. The final ten days: expect the crowd. 42% of 2025's Black Friday ads launched in the last week alone. If your plan is to switch everything on that week, you will be one of hundreds of thousands of new ads doing the same.

None of this says early is better for every brand. It says the early slot is open, and the brands above have used it.

How this list was built

Every figure comes from Brandsearch's index of Meta ads, which includes the reach Meta publishes for ads shown in the EU and UK. The pulls ran on 21 October 2026.

• Weekly counts: ads whose copy, carousel cards or page name contain "black friday", grouped by the week they launched and divided by all Meta ads launched that week, for 1 September to 19 October 2026 and the same calendar weeks of 2025, plus each week from 20 October to 30 November 2025 for the season curve. These are counts of ads, not brands: a brand running ten versions counts ten times. They include advertisers of every kind, not only ecommerce, and some loose text matches.
• Year on year: Brandsearch indexed about 52% more Meta ads launched between 1 September and 19 October 2026 than over the same dates in 2025, so raw counts are not compared across years; shares of all new ads are.
• The 12 ads: active Black Friday ads launched since 1 September, one per brand, sorted by EU reach, then checked one by one against the ad's own record. We kept ecommerce brands selling to consumers, with EU reach published, and aimed for a mix of countries, categories and mechanics.
• Removed: Shopify's merchant-acquisition ad (the largest "Black Friday" ad of the period, 1.56 million reached), payment and point-of-sale providers selling to merchants, a webinar, a charity, a prize draw, a sourcing platform, a hearing-glasses store-visit ad, an ad running under an unrelated domain, duplicate country domains of one brand (collapsed), and one ad whose record showed no EU reach.
• Mechanic classification: done by hand on the copy of the 60 highest-reaching Black Friday ads launched since 1 October, of which 41 remained after the same exclusions. One label per ad, by its main mechanic.

What the numbers are: reach published under EU transparency rules, Brandsearch's estimate of the matching spend, and launch and last-seen dates. What they are not: global spend, sales, or proof that any of these offers worked. Revenue bands quoted in the text are Brandsearch's monthly estimates for each store.

Pulling this yourself

The list is one filtered call against the Meta ads index:

curl -G https://api.brandsearch.co/v1/meta-ads/search \
  -H "X-API-Key: $BRANDSEARCH_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode q="black friday" \
  -d ad_started_from=2026-09-01 \
  -d status=active \
  -d max_ads_per_brand=1 \
  -d sort_by=eu_total_reach \
  -d sort_order=desc

Each row returns eu_total_reach, eu_total_spend, start_date, end_date and the creative's copy. Filter end_date to the last few days in your own code if you only want ads still serving. Swap the query for "early access" or "black week", or add country_code to watch your own market. Over MCP, the weekly counts come from the Meta ads aggregates tool with a start and end date per week (over HTTP, POST /v1/meta-ads/aggregates), so Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can rebuild the chart above for your own category. Get an API key.

Related

Last season's final numbers, with spend, reach and start dates for 20 DTC brands, are in Black Friday ad examples: 20 DTC brands, their reach and estimated spend. To set up the same kind of watch on your own competitors, see how to spy on competitor holiday campaigns before you brief yours and how to know when a competitor is about to run a sale.

Frequently asked questions

When is Black Friday 2026?
Friday 27 November 2026. Cyber Monday follows on 30 November. Many European brands run the whole week, sometimes called Black Week, and a few call it Black Month.

When do Black Friday ads start?
In September, at the same pace as last year. By 19 October 2026, 29,672 Meta ads mentioning Black Friday had launched since 1 September, about 0.19% of all new Meta ads in Brandsearch's index, against 0.22% at the same point in 2025. The earliest ecommerce example in this list, Toddla's, went live on 2 September. The bulk still arrives late: in 2025, 42% of the season's Black Friday ads launched in the final week.

Is it too early to run Black Friday ads in October?
Not for every kind of ad. In October, the brands in this list mostly ran early-access sign-ups, bundles, and "don't wait" messages, rather than their deepest discount. Those ads collect an audience or sell at a structured price while the auction is still quiet, and keep the main offer for November.

What is a Black Friday early access campaign?
An ad that asks people to join a list, by email or a Meta lead form, in exchange for seeing the offers first. Dermalogica's reads "Join the waitlist for Dermalogica Black Friday early access" and Graham & Green's promises "our offers before anyone else". A quarter of the early ads classified here were this type.

What Black Friday deals are brands running already?
In this sample: up to 60% off at Bodyform, 50% plus a free gift at Toddla, 30% at ALOHAS, a £39.99 bundle at Icy Bear Dental, 2-for-1 at MAKANI, pick three watches and pay for one at VORO, and up to €150 off with a price-match guarantee until 4 December at Secretlab.

How can I see which competitors have started their Black Friday ads?
Meta's Ad Library searches one advertiser at a time. Brandsearch indexes the same ads with launch dates and European reach, filterable by copy, start date and competitor domain. Start with a free search.