The two-week runway

Week one: teaser and behind-the-scenes

Days 1-3 are for the teaser: a close-up crop of new art, a colour swatch, or the box before it's labelled. Don't reveal the full sheet yet — curiosity is the job of week one.

Days 4-7 go behind the scenes: your desk mid-illustration, the print proof coming off the machine, a short video of test cuts. This is where people start to feel like insiders rather than customers.

Vary the format across the week rather than repeating the same crop seven times — a photo on day one, a fifteen-second video on day three, and a text-only 'ask me anything' story on day five keep the feed from feeling repetitive.

Week two: reveal, open, close

Day 8 is the full reveal — the finished sheet or box flat-lay, no more teasing. Day 9-10 is the sales page going live to the waitlist only, 24-48 hours ahead of the public.

Day 11 opens to everyone. Days 12-13 are reminder days for anyone who clicked but didn't buy. Day 14 is the close, with a hard cut-off time stated in every post, not just 'soon'.

• Day 1-3: teaser crops, no full reveal
• Day 4-7: behind-the-scenes process content
• Day 8: full reveal of the sheet or box
• Day 9-10: early access for waitlist
• Day 11: public open
• Day 14: hard close, stated time and timezone

Why the runway shouldn't stretch longer

Beyond two weeks, attention fades faster than anticipation builds. A four-week runway usually produces a worse launch than a two-week one because the early excitement has nowhere to go and people forget.

If you need more prep time, do it before day 1 starts, not by stretching the public-facing runway. The clock only starts once you post the first teaser.

The exception is a genuinely new product line or a much bigger cap than usual — in that case, add a single extra week to week zero for education content (how it's made, why it's priced this way) rather than extending the teaser-to-close window itself.

Think of the runway like a held note rather than a slow build: it should feel taut the whole way through, not gradually louder. A month of daily posts about the same envelope reads as padding, while two weeks of tightly sequenced content reads as momentum.

Adjusting the runway for repeat launches

Once you've run two or three launches, your list already knows the rhythm, so you can compress week one to three or four days of teasing instead of seven — returning buyers need less warm-up than first-timers did.

Keep the hard close and the 24-48 hour early-access window no matter how short the runway gets. Those two elements do most of the work of creating urgency, and cutting them to save a day usually costs more sales than it's worth.

A shorter runway also means less room for error, so tighten your own checklist before day 1: confirm the sales page, stock counts and email drafts are ready a full day earlier than you think you need to, since a five-day teaser leaves almost no slack to fix a mistake mid-week.