Mother’s Day 2025: A look at sales, trends & takeaways
Mother’s Day 2025: A look at sales, trends & takeaways
Another Mother’s Day has been and gone, and what a weekend it was! From bustling restaurants to a last-minute gift card rush, this year’s celebrations showed us once again that Mother’s Day is one of the biggest occasions for hospitality businesses.
So, how did sales shape up? What trends stood out? And what can we take away for next year? Let’s dive in.
The big picture 💡
- Total gift card sales in March: £4.5m (£1.5m the week leading up to MD)
- Busiest sales day: Mother’s Day Eve, like Christmas Eve, the day before the big day is a perfect sales opportunity for your brand. (£283k sold on 29/03 compared with an average of £130k for the previous Saturdays in March)
What this tells us about promotions and our big-ticket day marketing is that it is key to make sure we are marketing right up to the wire. An influx of last-minute sales means prepaid revenue can be given an injection of new business as long as your customers know it is available.
- Purchase highlights:
One well-established pub group ran a spend £50, receive £75 promotion, resulting in their highest-ever gift card sales month to date even overshadowing Black Friday, Father’s Day and Christmas months in 2024. They also saw an average 60% uplift in in-venue basket spend from redemptions. Interestingly, they ran the exact same promotion in 2024 and still managed a 435% YoY increase in Mother’s Day sales this year.
A premium casual dining brand offered a spend £40, receive £50 deal, achieving £26k in gift card sales, up from £8k the previous year — that’s a 212% increase YoY with the same offer.
Meanwhile, a pan-Asian restaurant group saw strong results from a 20% added value promotion, reaching £7k in sales. This was a marked improvement on their 2024 campaign, where a more modest 10% offer resulted in lower engagement. The uplift shows how a small shift in strategy can make a big difference when it comes to seasonal gifting campaigns.
- Average order value: £49.55 - this was £66 for customers with a MD promotion, showing that guests were happy to hand over the same value rather than spend less during a promo.
- Digital vs. physical gift cards: We saw a split of 63% digital, 37% physical gift cards throughout March with digital increasing to over 70% share on average the week leading up to Mother’s Day.
Trends we spotted 👀
💌 Email & SMS drove last-minute sales – Campaigns sent in the final 48 hours helped push a final surge, highlighting that it’s never too late to keep your customers in the loop.
🎁 More thoughtful gifting – Experience-led gifts, such as dining packages or overnight stays, outperformed standard monetary gift cards—proving that personalisation matters.
What worked well? ✅
- Website & checkout optimisation – Toggle’s simple, mobile-friendly purchasing experiences helped convert more buyers.
- Upselling & bundles – Bundling up your offerings by adding set menus or offering upgraded products with a bottle of fizz encouraged higher spending per transaction.
- Promos with real value - Brands that offered clear added value saw significant uplift in both sales volume and average order value. Customers still
How can you maximise big-ticket day opportunities in the future?
- Push in-venue promotion – Many guests dined out over the weekend but may not have considered buying a gift card for their mum. By placing more visible reminders in-venue could help capture footfall and drive sales leading up to the big day.
- Utilising UGC – Showcasing customer reviews or user-generated content from previous Mother’s Day experiences can showcase your experience-based gifts.
- Test more urgency messaging – Countdown timers or limited-time offers could help drive those purchases right up to the wire.
Final takeaways
Mother’s Day 2025 delivered another strong performance, and it’s clear that hospitality gifting is here to stay. With a mix of experience buyers and last-minute shoppers, the key to maximising sales lies in understanding your customers and how they celebrate these special days and approaching this across multiple channels.
Now, time for a quick breather… before we start gearing up for Father’s Day!
