(ABC 6 News) – Everyone’s heard of Black Friday, but local small businesses were hoping to bring in shoppers with early deals on Pink Friday.

Established in 2020, Pink Friday takes place the week before Black Friday as a way to encourage customers to start their holiday shopping with local small businesses.

For the locally-owned Rochester retailer Real Deals, this year Pink Friday was a massive success, seeing at least twice as many customers come through the door than on a usual Friday.

“I think it’s good idea to support our local businesses and keep the money in the local area, and we don’t need to use Amazon all the time,” said Scott Spiten after shopping at Real Deals.

This year, Real Deals tried out a new “pink bag” promotion, where all-day customers would receive 20% of any items they could fit in a pink plastic bag. After only six hours of being open, almost all 150 pink bags had been used, with only a few of the smaller sizes left for late shoppers.

“It’s just a fun like little test to see like how much can I actually fit in this bag, and the way women have been clever today of figuring that out, I’ve been thoroughly impressed,” said Real Deals owner, Ashley Moberg.

Moberg says the pink bags were such a fun and successful sales tactic, they will definitely be making a comeback, because she loves to engage the community to create a positive shopping experience for everyone.

“A fun atmosphere for ladies to come in and shop and kinda lose themselves in the inspiration of what we hopefully provide,” said Moberg.

Moberg’s favorite part about running her small business is the face to face relationship with customers, something she says you can’t get by shopping online or at a major retailer.

“It’s almost impossible to compete against that, the Amazons and the Targets, and so we do our best to just keep up our customer service,” said Moberg. “Our customers are so sweet and they actually, we get so many ‘thank you’s on a weekly basis and a daily basis of just like being here and people recognize how hard we work every single day.”

Real Deals customers say they shop small because they also value that personal connection.

“The local businesses or local people are all so very helpful, you know, courteous and nice, they appreciate your business and they’re here to help you,” said customer Katie Spiten.

Real Deals has many more sales planned for the remainder of the holiday season, which you can follow here.