The maker's selling calendar: when to pour
2026-11-01 · Frontubo
Most holiday advice for makers starts at the holiday. That is the wrong end. A cold-process soap needs about six weeks to cure, a candle about two, and a parcel needs a week or more to get there. So the date that matters is the day you pour, and for soap it is more than two months before the holiday.
The rule
Pour date = holiday − delivery buffer − cure time
- Delivery buffer: 7 days in the table below. It is a round number that covers domestic post and a few days of slack. For international parcels, use your carrier’s published last-posting dates instead; they are much earlier and vary by country.
- Cure time: 42 days for cold-process soap, 14 days for a candle. These are rules of thumb. Your own recipe may need more or less. Use the figure you trust.
- Listing date: 4 weeks before you ship. Etsy and Google take time to show a new listing. This one is our guess, not a rule. Treat it as a minimum.
Dates for 2026–27
The holiday dates were worked out from each country’s rule. Check them again in your own calendar.
| Holiday | Date | Last day to ship | Pour soap by | Pour candles by | List by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Christmas (US, UK, FR) | Fri 25 Dec 2026 | Fri 18 Dec (domestic only) | already past | Fri 4 Dec | Fri 20 Nov |
| Valentine’s Day | Sun 14 Feb 2027 | Sun 7 Feb | Sun 27 Dec 2026 | Sun 24 Jan | Sun 10 Jan |
| Mothering Sunday (UK) | Sun 7 Mar 2027 | Sun 28 Feb | Sun 17 Jan | Sun 14 Feb | Sun 31 Jan |
| Mother’s Day (US) | Sun 9 May 2027 | Sun 2 May | Sun 21 Mar | Sun 18 Apr | Sun 4 Apr |
| Fête des mères (FR) | Sun 30 May 2027 | Sun 23 May | Sun 11 Apr | Sun 9 May | Sun 25 Apr |
| Father’s Day (US, UK, FR) | Sun 20 Jun 2027 | Sun 13 Jun | Sun 2 May | Sun 30 May | Sun 16 May |
How the dates are set:
- UK Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter. Easter is 28 March in 2027.
- US Mother’s Day is the second Sunday of May.
- French Fête des mères is the last Sunday of May, unless Pentecost falls on that day, when it moves to the first Sunday of June. Pentecost is 16 May in 2027, so it stays on 30 May.
- Father’s Day is the third Sunday of June in all three countries.
The Christmas row is the one to read carefully. If you sell soap and had not already poured, a Christmas soap range is no longer possible this year. Candles, bath salts and anything with no cure time still are, if you start now.
The autumn season
Candle sales rise as the weather turns, from September through to Christmas. If you are planning next year, pour your autumn and winter scents in August and list in early September, so Google has time to find them before the buying peaks. We do not have our own sales data on this, so check it against last year’s orders in your own shop.
Using it
- Pick the holidays you actually sell for. Ignore the rest.
- Put the pour date in your calendar, not the holiday.
- Change the delivery buffer and the cure time to yours, and recompute.
- Plan the discount and the stock at the same time. The Black Friday guide shows how to work out what a sale costs you.
What we have not checked
This is arithmetic from the rules above, not a record of what sells when. We have not run a sale on these dates. Cure times, and how long a listing takes to show up, vary. Treat the table as a starting point and write your own numbers in the margin.
We will update the dates each autumn. Last updated 2026-11-01.