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When should you start buying inventory for a specific season or holiday? It’s a question we often hear from independent retailers, and staying ahead of consumer demand is more critical than ever in 2025. To help retailers prepare for key shopping moments, we analyzed the latest global marketplace search trends on Faire to identify when interest in major occasions starts to rise and when it peaks.
While every year brings its own unique patterns, and no forecast is 100% accurate, this data offers a handy guide for planning purchases for traditionally high-traffic holidays like Mother’s Day, Halloween, and Christmas, as well as seasonal moments like summer, fall, and back-to-school shopping.
For brands, this calendar provides insights into when retailers typically begin ordering for major occasions, helping you align your production schedules and maximize opportunities in the year ahead.
Valentine’s Day shopping: January
On Faire, love is definitely in the air come February 14. Valentine’s Day was one of the top search terms of the year in 2021 and 2023. In 2024, almost 54% of search queries including “valentine” took place in January, along with 7,000 searches for “Valentine’s Day.” In total, there were over 13,000 searches for Valentine’s Day in 2024, starting as early as November 2023.
Easter and spring shopping: February
Next up? Easter. Though it’s not until spring, Easter shopping starts in December and dramatically falls in April, with its peak in February, which in 2024 was at 22,000 searches. Meanwhile, even though the official first day of spring wasn’t until March 19 of 2024, spring shopping started as early as November 2023 and peaked in February with more than 11,000 searches. Global searches totaled 56,000 for Easter and 50,000 for spring.
Mother’s Day and graduation shopping: April
Mother’s Day takes place yearly on the second Sunday in May, but retailers start thinking about the holiday well before then. The first searches for Mother’s Day trickled in during January, but they doubled in February, rising quickly after that, with a peak at around 18,000 in April. The global total searches for Mother’s Day in 2024 was 36,000.
Meanwhile, graduation—which is usually sometime at the end of May or early June—started to appear in searches as early as February, with its peak in April at 4,000 and a global total of 11,000.
Father’s Day and summer shopping: May
In 2024, searches for summer began as early as January, with their peak during June at 13,000, totaling 69,000 globally.
Father’s Day takes place on the third Sunday of June each year, and in 2024, retailers began searching for the occasion in March, with searches peaking in May at around 7,000. The global total for 2024 was 12,000.
Back-to-school shopping: July
With September comes back-to-school shopping—but searches started as early as June and peaked in July at over 5,000, and totals for 2024 come in at 11,000.
Halloween and fall shopping: August
Retailers started ramping up their searches for the end of the year as early as June, with both Halloween and fall on their minds. Peak searches for both terms came in August, with global totals for Halloween coming in at 79,000 and for fall at 100,000.
Christmas and holiday shopping: June through November
As perhaps the biggest retail holiday of the year, it’s no surprise that the holiday season saw the highest search volume. The major buying moment is never too far from retailers’ minds, and searches for Christmas in 2024 started as early as June, peaking in November at 66,000, and totaled 246,000 globally. The term “holiday” was not far behind, with 165,000 global searches starting in August and peaking in October and November.Dive into more data from 2024—and see our predictions for this year—with The Faire Forecast.
