TL;DR
Mother’s Day is a $38 billion retail event, making it the second-highest spending gifting occasion of the year, with average consumer spending hitting a record $284.
Most brands underinvest, with 77% of creator budgets concentrated on the end-of-year holidays, leading to a reactive, last-minute approach for this major commerce moment.
To win, brands must treat Mother's Day with Q4-level rigor, leveraging the high-trust "creator mompreneur" ecosystem and sequencing content weeks in advance, starting their planning in Q1.
Historically, Mother’s Day marketing for brands hasn’t been a priority. Later data found that 77% of brands concentrate creator budgets in November and December, focusing a majority of their marketing efforts on the end-of-year holiday window. They build dedicated influencer rosters, sequence content weeks in advance, and treat those moments as true commerce events. Then Mother’s Day arrives, and most of them scramble. A last-minute email, a generic social post, and maybe a promoted product collection that went live five days before the holiday.
The problem is that the holiday they’re scrambling to cover is one of the biggest on the retail calendar.
Mother’s Day has quietly become one of the highest-spend gifting occasions of the year. The creator economy has made it even more potent. Yet the majority of brand marketers still treat it like a Hallmark holiday rather than the commerce event it actually is. That gap is a major opportunity, and the brands that figure this out first are going to widen the distance on everyone else.
The spending case is stronger than most brands realize
The National Retail Federation has been tracking Mother’s Day consumer spending for over two decades, and the trajectory is unmistakable. Consumer spending on Mother’s Day is expected to reach a record $38 billion this year, with average per-person spending hitting a record $284 on gifts.
According to NRF Vice President of Industry and Consumer Insights Katherine Cullen, Mother’s Day is second only to the winter holidays in terms of spending. Yet the influencer budget allocation, content planning cycles, and creator sourcing timelines brands deploy for Mother’s Day rarely reflect that reality.
As with previous years, the NRF report found that 84% of U.S. adults are expected to celebrate Mother’s Day. This isn’t a niche audience, either. It’s essentially the entire adult consumer population with a wallet and a reason to spend.
The category spread matters, too. Jewelry leads in total spend at $7.5 billion, while electronics is surpassing $4 billion for the first time. Gifts of experience continue to grow, with a record one-third of consumers planning to give experiences such as concerts or sporting events. That breadth cuts across nearly every gifting-adjacent category, from beauty to home to food and lifestyle.
No matter what category you claim, a single, generic social post doesn’t cut it. Discovery may happen in the social feed, but consumers need multi-touch validation before checking out. Survey data reveals that 38% of shoppers rely on reviews and 29% rely on video demos before making a purchase. If brands wait until five days before Mother’s Day to post, they aren’t giving shoppers enough time to do their due diligence. Brands need to sequence creator content weeks in advance so shoppers can see authentic demos, read creator reviews, and validate the purchase.
The spending case is stronger than most brands realize
If the spending data is this clear, why does Mother’s Day consistently get underfunded? A few things are happening at once:
The perception problem: Valentine’s Day benefits from decades of brand investment that have trained consumers and marketers to see it as a commerce event first. Mother’s Day still carries a cultural association with sentimentality over commerce, even though consumer behavior has moved well past that framing. Brands internalize the Hallmark framing and plan accordingly. They reach for generic emotional creative instead of building a real gifting strategy.
The timing problem: Mother’s Day falls in May, and Q2 planning often happens while teams are still in decompression mode from the holiday window. By the time someone asks “what are we doing for Mother’s Day,” there’s rarely enough runway left to build a proper creator strategy, source the right talent, and execute sequenced content. The result is reactive instead of strategic.
The audience problem: Valentine’s Day has a tidier buyer profile compared to Mother’s Day. Spouses, children, siblings, partners, and friends are all buying for different mother figures in their lives. Brands that aren’t sure how to frame the audience often default to doing less. But that diffusion is actually an asset. It means the addressable audience is larger than other niche holidays.
The brands getting this right are the ones treating Mother’s Day with the same creative and operational rigor as their Q4 calendar. They’re building creator rosters with Mother’s Day in mind rather than drafting influencer briefs the week before.
The creator mompreneur advantage
Here’s where the Mother’s Day opportunity gets differentiated from other holidays: the creator ecosystem around motherhood is among the most engaged, highest-trust creator category in social media.
Mom creators have long been a staple of influencer marketing. But the emergence of the creator mompreneur, AKA a mom creator who also runs or promotes a small business, side hustle, or brand of her own, has produced something more powerful than a lifestyle influencer audience. These creators speak directly to other mothers who identify as both consumers and entrepreneurs. Their audiences follow them not just for product inspiration, but for validation, community, and a sense of peer-to-peer trust that’s difficult to produce.
For mom micro influencers specifically, that trust premium is amplified by the perceived authenticity of someone who is living the exact same life as their audience. They’re relatable in a very specific, daily way. The engagement is just further proof: micro influencers see two to three times as much engagement as mega influencers.
For brands in gifting-adjacent categories, that differential translates directly to purchase consideration and conversion. It’s also why the creator selection criteria for campaigns like Lindt x American Greetings went beyond follower count. The brief specifically called for mom micro influencers with engaged audiences and an unfiltered, natural-light aesthetic. That specificity in casting is what separates a campaign that hits its benchmarks from one that blows past them.
The platform behavior supports this, too. Audiences are more likely to trust influencers who share relatable, topic-specific content, especially in categories like wellness, finance, and parenting, over broad lifestyle influencers. Motherhood is one of the most cohesive identity categories in the creator economy. It’s a community with its own language, values, and purchasing behavior.
What successful Mother’s Day creator campaigns look like
These creator campaigns demonstrate what it looks like when brands treat the holiday as a strategic priority rather than a scheduling afterthought.
Walmart+ “Moms Answer Moms”
Walmart+ launched its “Moms Answer Moms ” campaign on TikTok and Instagram in April 2024, turning Mother’s Day messaging into a live, interactive experience. Instead of a traditional tribute ad, the brand invited celebrity moms like Paris Hilton and Tia Mowry to answer real questions from other mothers on social media. The campaign worked because it used TikTok’s native behavior, live Q&A and user-generated participation, to make the brand feel like part of the conversation rather than an interruption of it. The peer-validation dynamic that makes mom creators so effective was baked directly into the campaign format.
Brilliant Earth’s influencer-designed collection
Brilliant Earth’s 2025 Mother’s Day campaign featured style influencers Tania Sarin (@taniasarin) and Brigette Pheloung (@acquired.style) alongside their actual mothers. The campaign went a step further than most influencer activations by inviting each creator to co-design a piece in a limited collection. Sarin’s “Star” black diamond medallion was inspired by her mother’s elegance, while Pheloung’s “Sun” aquamarine medallion centered on a birthstone shared by both mother and daughter.
What stood out about this campaign is that the jewelry brand gave creators a stake in the creative, rather than just casting them to model existing products. The result was content that felt personal rather than sponsored. This is an important distinction for a luxury purchase category where the emotional logic of the gift matters as much as the product itself.
The campaign also surfaced a practical insight for jewelry brands specifically: the “Medallions with Meaning” collection was designed to highlight the brand’s customization capabilities, and the influencer narrative gave that capability a story. Co-creation with creators is one of the more underleveraged tools in the Mother’s Day playbook, and Brilliant Earth used it well.
Marias Gamesas’ Mother’s Day giveaway
Marias Gamesas took a different approach to Mother’s Day 2025. The brand partnered with Latina creators who shared how Marias fits into the rhythms of their family life. A giveaway built around “life’s simple pleasures” gave audiences a reason to engage while reinforcing the campaign’s central idea that the most meaningful Mother’s Day gifts are centered around moments and memories.
What made it work is the same thing that makes creator mompreneurs so effective in this space: the content didn’t read as a gift guide, but as a shared experience. Mom creators already occupy one of the most community-driven corners of the creator economy, with audiences that respond to lifestyle specificity and authenticity over polish. Marias leaned into that rather than trying to broaden the message into something more generic. For food and lifestyle brands with a clear cultural identity, this is a playbook worth studying.
What made it work is the same thing that makes creator mompreneurs so effective in this space: the content didn’t read as a gift guide, but as a shared experience. Mom creators already occupy one of the most community-driven corners of the creator economy, with audiences that respond to lifestyle specificity and authenticity over polish. Marias leaned into that rather than trying to broaden the message into something more generic. For food and lifestyle brands with a clear cultural identity, this is a playbook worth studying.
How to showcase Mother’s Day the way it deserves
The practical gap between brands that win Mother’s Day and brands that miss it comes down to one thing: sequencing.
The brands that perform are starting earlier, selecting creators with more intention, and building content that works across the full consideration window, not just the week before the holiday. This strategy applies to all underutilized holidays, including Father’s Day, summer holidays, and Halloween.
While this year’s window has already passed, now is the time to start thinking about next year’s Mother’s Day campaign. Here’s how:
Start earlier than you think: Influencer marketing teams should be thinking about Mother’s Day at the beginning of Q1. This means sourcing creators in January and February.
Sequence Mother’s Day like a full holiday campaign: This means briefing for Mother’s Day content the way you’d brief for a Valentine’s Day campaign: with a defined persona, a platform strategy, and a clear content ladder from awareness to conversion.
Go niche with creator selection: This requires thinking about which creator archetype is right for your category. For a beauty brand, a creator mompreneur with a self-care-focused audience is a different bet than a broad lifestyle influencer. For a food brand, the mom who documents weeknight dinners has a more conversion-ready audience than one who posts aesthetics.
Create story-driven briefs over product-focused ones: Nearly half of Mother’s Day shoppers say finding a gift that’s unique or different is most important to them, and 39% focus on creating a special memory. This is the perfect brief for creator content, not a product feature list.
The brands that show up with creator-led storytelling that’s authentic, specific, and timely will capture that intent before the brands that show up late with a discount code.
If you’re building a creator strategy and want to understand what a planned, sequenced, data-backed Mother’s Day influencer program looks like at scale, explore our influencer marketing services.
