Four businesses share how Sidekick helped them prepare for the busiest sales season of the year, without exhausting their teams.

The pressure builds quickly. Three weeks before Black Friday Cyber Monday, a founder is racing through a long list of tasks. She is forecasting inventory, crafting campaign messaging and preparing customer support for the rush. Everything seems under control.

Then she discovers a last-minute problem. The entire site still needs updated copy. Instead of pushing her small team beyond capacity, she opens Sidekick. Within minutes, every product description is rewritten with conversion-ready text.

Sidekick acts like an AI co-founder inside Shopify. More than 750,000 merchants used it for the first time in Q3, relying on it for everything from email creation to analytics. It is the equivalent of five new hires in one assistant, offering design help, marketing support, technical knowledge and data insights, all tailored to each business. During the crucial lead-up to the holidays, this support can make a measurable difference.

With 88 percent of merchants experimenting with AI this season, Sidekick is becoming central to holiday planning. Here is how four businesses are using it to regain time, simplify work and sharpen strategy before the seasonal rush hits.

Holiday marketing at scale

Merchant: Brave Little Ones
Products: Children’s wear
Location: USA
Sidekick superpower: Updating the site and creating assets

The family brand Brave Little Ones knows the value of AI. Ahead of last year’s holidays, they moved their store to Horizon, Shopify’s AI-powered theme foundation. “I was actually pretty shocked that within a day you could get everything migrated over to a new theme,” says co-founder Jon Ezell.

Site changes are a regular part of their seasonal prep, and Sidekick has made that process faster. “Sidekick allows us to come up with a concept and then immediately create a section and throw it on the website and see if it worked or not,” Jon says.

This year he plans to use it to create custom BFCM banners and quickly experiment with different versions based on how customers respond.

An onboarding guide built into the business

Merchant: BlackMilk Clothing
Products: Apparel and accessories
Location: Australia
Sidekick superpower: Technical help and support for global expansion

BlackMilk is known for bold prints and high-profile collaborations across gaming, entertainment and pop culture. As the brand prepares for its holiday traffic, CEO Jackie Kruger has found Sidekick surprisingly helpful in an unexpected area: onboarding.

New team members can use Sidekick to understand store operations without feeling hesitant to ask basic questions. “Sometimes you don't want to sound like an idiot and ask questions that you should know the answer to,” Jackie says. “Sidekick helps with that. It knows the store so it can help to answer technical questions.”

Beyond holiday demand, BlackMilk is focused on international growth. “We’re looking at the data split so we can regionalise the activities we are doing,” Jackie says. “Sidekick is definitely helping with that.”

Data-driven forecasting without the complexity

Merchant: Cancha
Products: Accessories
Location: UK
Sidekick superpower: Smarter inventory planning

Former professional tennis player Jack Oswald created Cancha to solve travel frustrations he experienced during his career. Now the business ships globally, and with that growth comes operational complexity. Jack leans heavily on AI.

“It allows me to approach strategic planning in a way that simply wasn't possible a year or two ago,” he says. “As a solopreneur, I’m often managing multiple interdependent plans without a co-founder to bounce ideas off of.”

Cancha uses Sidekick to prepare for major product launches and holiday sales. “We used Sidekick to plan inventory production based on last year's Q4 sales velocity,” Jack says. “It was incredibly useful for work that otherwise would have taken hours.”

The six-figure role you do not need to hire

Merchant: Félix & Norton
Products: Gourmet cookies
Location: Canada
Sidekick superpower: Boosting team productivity

Félix & Norton, famous for gourmet cookie deliveries, nearly hired a full-time data analyst before Sidekick launched. “AI tools make it so we don't have to hire,” says COO Simon Paquin. “I get to be a COO, CMO, part-time CFO, and I get all of my work done in my 9 to 5.”

During the holidays, when gifting and large orders increase, Simon uses Sidekick to guide spending and campaign optimisation. “We have an online sales conversion campaign on Facebook and that's the bread and butter of the business,” he says. “When I put my Facebook costs into Sidekick, it tells me what I should do.”

The new holiday playbook

The holiday season is now shaped by AI on both sides of the shopping experience. Customers use AI to find deals and gift ideas, while brands rely on tools like Sidekick, which has already supported nearly 100 million conversations.

Sidekick gives smaller teams the capabilities once only available to enterprise operations. It manages time-consuming tasks so merchants can focus on the moments that matter most: delivering memorable shopping experiences and building customer relationships that last well beyond the holidays.