Museums set sights on Black Friday and Museum Shop Sunday sales

Museum shops in the UK are preparing for one of their biggest weekends of the year as they hope to capitalise on the growing popularity of culture and heritage-related gifts in the run-up to Christmas.

Along with Black Friday, which sees hundreds of museum shops offering significant retail discounts every year, the sector-specific event Museum Shop Sunday has become an increasingly important date on the retail calendar since it launched in 2017.

Taking place on 1 December this year, the event will see more than 2,100 museums, galleries and heritage institutions worldwide running special activities and campaigns to promote their retail offer.

Museum Shop Sunday promotes original, design-led shopping and encourages consumers to “shop with purpose and support their favourite arts, heritage and cultural attractions”.

The international initiative aims to highlight the vital role of retail in arts, cultural and heritage venues during one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year.

Participation is open to all non-profit cultural venues, including museums, galleries, cathedrals, libraries, theatres, historic houses and gardens.

The Association of Cultural Enterprises (ACE), which coordinates the event in the UK, said: “It’s a great opportunity to showcase your fantastic shops and unique products, reach new audiences and boost sales.”

Museums can get involved by running a social media campaign or online promotion, or hosting an event in store. Logos and a template press release are available in the association’s marketing toolkit, and ideas on how to get started can be found in the association's FAQs.

According to ACE, participants in previous years have reported increases of up to 68% in sales, 55% in footfall and 49% in average transaction value.

One participant, Claire Selman of Chippenham Museum, told ACE: “It was a huge success – despite only being able to open for a few hours on the Sunday, we took our highest takings of the whole year.

“Our Museum Shop Sunday special opening gave us an opportunity to promote our shop and products to our local audience, enabling many shoppers to discover us for the first time. With the extra media attention we noticed an uplift in sales in the build up to the event as well as on the day itself.”

Meanwhile, research by the retail firm Purple Moon Promo has found that museum gift shops offer the best-value souvenirs in the UK’s visitor attraction sector, with an average price of £12.13.

Of the UK’s visitor attractions, the Tower of London and the British Museum saw the second and third highest number of merchandise searches on Google this year, with 8,780 searches made for Tower of London merchandise and 7,440 made for British Museum merchandise.