Quick Summary
- On paper, it’s still Washington’s Birthday; in the marketplace, it’s Presidents’ Day.
- Bicycle merchants reframed the holiday in the 1890s, automotive dealers expanded it, and mattress brands scaled it nationally in the 1980s.
- What began as a clever category play turned into hundreds of nearly identical red, white, and blue campaigns.
- Marketing can reshape cultural language, but copying the template eventually erases brand distinctiveness.
The federal government still calls it Washington’s Birthday, but retailers call it Presidents’ Day. This shift came from advertising, repeated so consistently for so long that it started to sound official.
Here’s how this holiday hijacking happened, and why two retail categories benefited more than anyone else.
The 1980s Rebrand Nobody Approved
The federal holiday has been Washington’s Birthday since 1879. People tried to rename it more than once, including a failed 1951 proposal to officially make it Presidents’ Day.
Because Lincoln’s birthday falls on February 12, just ten days before Washington’s Birthday, some states informally recognized both. When the Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved Washington’s Birthday to the third Monday in February in 1971, that made it easy to celebrate a 2-for-1 birthday.
The shift also created a dependable three-day weekend that consumers and retailers could plan around.
“Presidents’ Day” sounded inclusive. It acknowledged both figures without requiring Congress to formally rename anything. The market adopted the shorthand long before the government did.
Repetition Made It Real
Advertisers latched onto the Presidents’ Day name without permission from the federal government. By the mid-1980s, the new label was everywhere. Retailers leaned into it and consumers repeated it.
People repeat what they hear most often, especially when it shows up every year, in the same week, in the same places. The three-day weekend gave brands the consistency they needed to turn a one-off promotion into a machine.
The Bicycle Day Origins
But President’s Day didn’t always belong to car dealers.
In the United States in the late 1800s, Washington’s Birthday was still a real civic moment in many towns, with parades and speeches and a little solemnity. At the same time, the country was falling hard for a new “fad”: bicycles.
This obsession marked the beginning of the holiday sale mindset formed long before anyone thought of the words “Presidents’ Day.”
Modern President’s Day bicycle commercial
By the 1890s, the holiday was called Bicycle Day. It’s the first evidence we have of a consumer product becoming so culturally attached to a federal holiday that it became part of everyday conversation.
Bicycle retailers made the holiday feel active instead of ceremonial. They gave people a reason to gather, partly for civic memory, partly for doing something together.
Here’s how it unfolded in modern marketing terms:
- Holiday events tied to product trials. Merchants organized races and family rides that put bicycles at the center of the day.
- Seasonal model launches. Washington’s Birthday became a moment to unveil new inventory ahead of spring demand.
- Civic language supported commerce. Ads wrapped cycling in patriotic framing, which made the purchase feel like participation.
Then car dealers plagiarized the playbook.
Auto Dealers Took the Wheel
Alvan T. Fuller, a Massachusetts auto dealer who later became governor, ran Washington’s Birthday open houses at his Commonwealth Avenue dealership in Boston. Other dealerships copied the model as the tradition spread.
In both cases, holidays became commercial platforms where a category repeatedly attached itself to real behavior and made that behavior easier, logical, more fun, or more socially rewarding.
Classic President’s Day auto ad
Home Retail Cornered the Calendar
Car dealers wrote the early chapters. Mattress retailers, followed by furniture and other home goods, then ran with it and turned the holiday into an annual category cash grab.
The timing solved real operational problems. February sits in a practical gap. Holiday shopping is over, and people start thinking about spring home refreshes. Many consumers have a long weekend and a little mental space.
Mattress retailers lined up their business realities with that moment:
- Brands needed to move older lines before spring rollouts, and Presidents’ Day created a clear deadline.
- Many categories did not treat February as a major tentpole, which gave mattresses room to dominate attention.
- The three-day weekend gave shoppers time to test, compare, and talk through financing.
- Once a customer commits to a mattress, add-ons like frames and pillows become easier to bundle.
The Numbers Behind the Noise
Here’s why the playbook persists:
- Nearly 80% of shoppers spend at least $100 during the President’s Day weekend. Furniture still leads purchase categories, along with clothing and electronics.
- Impulse buying runs high: 67% of consumers make unplanned purchases when they see the discounts.
- Multi-day sales events outperform single-day promotions by 34-42%.
- For furniture retailers, 2025 produced “one of the best weekends of the year” despite declining foot traffic.
The holiday still converts. It just doesn’t build brands the way it used to.
Success Created Invisibility
Because Presidents’ Day sales worked, everyone wanted in. Car dealers proved the weekend could move inventory, and mattress brands turned it into a revenue machine. Then the copycats arrived. And the copycats of the copycats.
Eventually, it stopped feeling like a smart strategy and started feeling like generic noise.
For example, take a look at the tools marketers use. PosterMyWall lists more than 4,610 Presidents’ Day marketing templates. Most of them rely on the same patriotic motifs.
The creative signals repeat across brands:
- Red, white, and blue dominate even for brands that never use those colors the rest of the year.
- Percent-off offers replace product stories, which makes one sale blur into the next.
- Flags and eagles and generic badges replace distinctive brand assets.
- “Ends Monday” becomes the loudest message, even when consumers see it from every brand at once.
Short-term gain, long-term risk
The promotion still works. “Ends Monday” creates urgency and compresses decision-making. Retailers move inventory before spring resets.
Consumers use the holiday as permission, and big purchases feel rational when framed as seasonal opportunity.
However, although Presidents’ Day marketing feels familiar, it doesn’t carry unique features that make any one message stick. Brand memory has eroded.
People buy during Presidents’ Day sales; they just don’t always remember from whom.
That distinction matters. Revenue can stay strong while brand equity stays flat. Consumers still buy during the window, but their decision hinges on discount depth or financing terms, not brand preference. That shifts power away from positioning and toward price.
That creates three structural risks:
- Margin pressure. If buyers can’t tell brands apart, the lowest price wins.
- Weaker recall outside the window. The holiday drives transactions but doesn’t build long-term memory.
- Reduced loyalty. Customers remember the deal, not the brand that offered it.
Noise converts in the short term, but it rarely builds brand equity. The machine keeps running, but it’s churning out generic creative that blurs together in the minds of consumers.
Modern Alternatives to President’s Day Sales
In recent years, some brands have chosen not to compete inside the same crowded window. Instead, they’ve created their own branded opportunities. For example, Amazon launched Prime Day, and Alibaba expanded Singles’ Day.
These brands have also jumped off the President’s Day bandwagon (or never got on in the first place):
- Wayfair: Way Day. Wayfair built a proprietary spring sales tentpole that drives traffic without relying on a federal holiday.
- Target: Target Circle Week. Target ties promotional urgency to its loyalty program, reinforcing membership instead of a national calendar cue.
- Best Buy: Black Friday in July. Best Buy introduced a mid-year branded sales event to create momentum during a traditionally slower retail window.
- Sephora: VIB Sale. Sephora turns tiered customer status into a scheduled shopping event that rewards loyalty and repeat planning.
- REI: Opt Outside. REI transformed Black Friday into a brand-defining statement by closing stores and centering purpose over promotion.
- Nike: SNKRS Drops. Nike routinely turns product launches into micro-events inside its SNKRS app.
- Apple: Keynote Launch Events. Apple stages product announcements as cultural moments that function as self-owned calendar events.
Those events work because instead of asking consumers to remember a shared national holiday, they require customers to remember a brand.
Marketer Takeaways
- Marketing can reshape public language. Use repetition to turn an unofficial label into the name most Americans use.
- Category coordination amplifies impact. When multiple brands in the same category reinforce the same framing, adoption accelerates (and so do sales).
- Imitation reduces memorability. Once multiple categories use the same cues, consumers struggle to recall any one campaign.
- Use timing to create leverage. A consistent three-day weekend allows advertisers to build a dependable sales machine ahead of time.
- Ownership carries more weight than participation. Proprietary moments such as Prime Day and Singles’ Day break out of generic holiday playbooks.
- Originality still wins. If you feel invisible during holiday noise, there’s a reason for that. That feeling of sameness is the predictable outcome of a template that everyone’s using.
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