Home Depot Unveils Spring ‘Cyber Week’ Event

It’s like Black Friday, but in spring. (And it’s online, and it lasts for a week.)

But the gist of Home Depot’s new “Cyber Week” event is that the home improvement retailer aims to duplicate some of the success from chockablock wintertime holiday shopping days — the aforementioned day after Thanksgiving and its online counterpart, Cyber Monday — in April.

“Cyber Week,” which began its inaugural run on Sunday (April 19), has essentially been in beta form as a single-day event, “Spring Black Friday,” for the last six years, according to Bloomberg.

“We had a great response on our traditional Cyber Week events,” Kevin Hofmann, Home Depot’s president of online operations, told the outlet. “That triggered us to say Thanksgiving time isn’t the only time customers want a deal, so let’s extend it into our peak selling season.”

It’s unsurprising that Home Depot would want to try to transfer a little Christmas-shopping-season magic to another part of the year, as the most recent Black Friday brought the chain its biggest sales day ever, to the tune of about $500 million, Bloomberg reports. That bit of good news no doubt came at the right time for Home Depot, as in November the company was still dealing with the fallout from its massive consumer data breach.

As for the reasoning behind making this new event an online one, Home Depot saw its online sales in the U.S. jump 37 percent to reach $3.8 billion in 2014, accounting for approximately 5 percent of the retailer’s total revenue.

Hofmann told Bloomberg that the company opted to associate “Cyber Week” with “Spring Black Friday” — despite a degree of negative connotation in some circles — in large part because the term resonates with consumers.

“It’s a constant challenge that retailers have of how do you capture the attention of the consumer and which buzzwords resonate versus which buzzwords turn people off,” he remarked. “There’s probably a debate on whether Black Friday is the right terminology, but it’s been working for us.”