The 30-day creative calendar for an ecommerce brand

Why a rhythm beats a list of ideas

The weekly rhythm

Seven fixed slots. The angle changes every week, the format does not. Read the third column before you rearrange anything, because each format sits where it does for a reason you may not want to trade away.

Prepare this before day one

Eight things to have in a folder before the month starts. Every one of them is something that otherwise stops production mid-session on day twelve.

• One clean packshot for every product you plan to feature

  Square to camera, evenly lit, label readable, no props and no hands. Every static and every generated scene inherits this file, so a crooked reference becomes a month of crooked images.

• A written list of the claims you can actually support

  One page. What the product does, what it does not do, any number you can substantiate and where the substantiation lives. Captions get written fast during a batch, and this page is what stops a claim appearing that nobody checked.

• Your ratios and safe areas decided

  Pick the ratios you will actually run, usually 4:5 for feed and 9:16 for stories and short video, and note which edges the platform interface covers. Produce at the final ratio rather than cropping later.

• Fifteen hooks written down before you produce any video

  The hook is the variable that changes who stays. Writing them in advance means the five video days are a production task rather than a writing task done under time pressure.

• A caption voice sample you can point at

  Three captions you already like, pasted into a document. Whoever writes the batch, human or otherwise, needs a reference for what your brand sounds like, or a month of captions will drift across four different voices.

• Publishing access confirmed on every account

  Check that the accounts are connected and the permissions still work before the batch, not on the morning of day one. Access is the most common reason a finished month sits in a folder unposted.

• A folder structure and a file naming pattern

  Something like day-format-ratio, for example 09-video-9x16. It takes two minutes to set up and it is the only thing that tells you in week three which file belongs to which day.

• One named person who approves

  One, not a committee. A batch of thirty needs a single pass from a single approver, otherwise the review becomes slower than the production and the calendar stalls before it starts.