Summer is a strange season for a lot of UK small businesses. Footfall shifts, spending habits change, and the things that work in November — hot drinks, cosy evenings in, gift purchases — simply stop working. Rather than treating the warmer months as a quiet patch to get through, many owners are using them to test small, low-risk additions to what they already sell. Done well, these additions don’t just plug a seasonal gap; they become permanent extra margin.
Here are five approaches worth considering, all of which can be trialled without a big upfront investment or a change to your core business.
- Add a high-margin impulse product
Impulse purchases thrive in summer. Cafés, garden centres, petrol stations, gyms, and even hairdressers have all found success adding a small, cold, refreshing product line near the till or entrance. The appeal isn’t the product itself so much as the margin: something that costs pennies to make and sells for a few pounds, with no real competition from anything else on offer nearby.
A good example is frozen drinks. A single countertop machine and some syrup can turn a quiet corner of a shop into a queue-forming feature during a heatwave, and the equipment pays for itself quickly given the margins involved — suppliers such as Slush Direct sell machines and syrup aimed specifically at businesses testing this as an add-on rather than a core offering, which is useful if you want to trial the idea before committing serious capital.
- Extend opening hours strategically, not uniformly
Rather than opening longer every day, look at which specific hours or days see a genuine uplift in summer. A shop near a park, beach, or event venue might benefit from two extra hours on Saturday afternoons but gain nothing from opening earlier on a Tuesday. Pull whatever footfall or sales data you have — even a rough manual count over two weeks is enough — before committing to a permanent change in hours, since the extra staffing cost needs to be justified by more than a hunch.
- Partner with a nearby, non-competing business
Cross-promotion costs nothing but a conversation. A florist and a café, a barber and a clothing shop, a bike repair shop and a local brewery — pairing with a business that shares your customer base but not your product can bring in new footfall for both sides. The simplest version is a shared voucher or a joint social media post; the more involved version is a physical takeover day, where one business hosts a stall or pop-up inside the other’s space. Summer, when people are out and about more, is the easiest time of year to test this.
- Turn slow stock into a limited-time offer
Every small business has stock that didn’t move as expected. Rather than letting it sit until a big end-of-season sale, consider smaller, more frequent flash promotions through summer — a weekend-only discount, a bundle deal, or a “buy one, gift one” offer tied to a specific event like a bank holiday. These create urgency without devaluing your full-price stock long-term, and they’re a useful way to free up cash and shelf space before autumn ordering begins.
- Test a pop-up or market stall
If your business has a physical premises, a pop-up stall at a local market, festival, or fair is a low-cost way to reach customers who’d never otherwise walk past your shop. Most local councils and market organisers charge a modest daily pitch fee, and the barrier to entry is far lower than opening a second location. It’s also a genuinely useful way to trial a new product line — including some of the impulse products mentioned above — before deciding whether it earns a permanent spot in your regular offering.
The common thread
None of these ideas require a business plan rewrite. They’re deliberately small: a new product line, a data-informed change to hours, a local partnership, a smarter approach to discounting, or a one-off stall booking. The point is to treat summer as a testing ground rather than a slow period to survive. If something works, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost very little in the process — and you’ll have a clearer picture of what your customers actually want from you when the next season comes around.
The businesses that do this well tend to share one habit: they measure the small experiment properly before scaling it up. A spreadsheet tracking daily sales against weather, footfall, or local events will tell you far more than instinct alone about which of these five ideas is worth doing again next year.