Local product launch checklist, six weeks out

A local product launch checklist has five stops on a six week clock. Six weeks out, fix the facts: the claim, the price, the pack sizes, the ship date and the label. Four weeks out, line up where the product will be seen and make the flyers from that one set of facts. Two weeks out, print, post and start taking names. Launch week is about counting. The fortnight after is about asking the first buyers what would bring them back.

The order matters more than the tasks. Almost every failed local launch has the same shape: a nice flyer printed before the price was final, a claim on the poster the label cannot back up, and a launch date announced before the stock was on a truck. The checklist below is built backwards from the day the first carton ships.

The worked example throughout is Bellbird Pantry’s product launch flyers, three A4 designs for a fictional Perth oat milk brand whose foodservice cases ship from 6 October 2026.

Six weeks out: fix the facts before the flyer

Write one fact sheet and treat it as the only source anyone may copy from. It holds the product name, the pack sizes, the price or price per case, the ship date, where it is made and the one claim you intend to lead with. Everything else in the launch, the flyers, the listing post, the email, the counter card, gets written from that page.

Pick a claim a buyer can test. Bellbird’s poster leads with a single sentence, that the barista carton steams to 65 degrees without splitting. A cafe owner can check that behind their own machine in a minute and a half, which is exactly why it persuades. “Creamy and delicious” cannot be checked, so it cannot persuade anyone who has been sold to before.

Check the label rules at the same time, not after the design. For food in Australia, the allergen labelling rules Food Standards Australia New Zealand describes took effect on 25 February 2024: allergens are declared in bold in the ingredient list and again in a separate summary statement in bold that begins with the word “contains”. The business.gov.au country of origin guidance says most food sold in shops or other retail settings needs a label saying where the ingredients come from. Bellbird’s second flyer exists because of these two rules. It walks through the allergen block, the nutrition panel and the country of origin mark, because a buyer who reads the back of the carton will check the front of the poster against it.

If the product is not food, the principle is the same with different rules. Find the labelling or safety standard that applies before a single claim reaches a design.

Four weeks out: three flyers for three readers

A launch has at least three audiences, and one flyer cannot serve all of them. The Bellbird set splits the job cleanly.

The editorial poster is for the person walking past. It carries the name, the one claim and three numbered facts: three ingredients, oats declared, pressed in Perth. Nothing about case sizes.

The range sheet is for the buyer. It lays out the barista carton, the original carton, the concentrate and the foodservice case in the order a wholesale order is written, and states that cases ship weekly in the Perth metro area with free samples. A buyer can decide on shelf space without making a phone call.

The label explainer is for the careful reader, often a venue manager who has to answer allergen questions from their own customers.

Compare this with the Rowan & Sons grand opening flyers, where the three designs are a date poster for the window, an offer sheet for the counter and a photo invitation for the mailing list. Different business, same rule: one reader, one job, one design.

This is also the week to open a way to take names. A sample request or waitlist form turns a flyer from a notice into a list you own. The waitlist signup form for a bakery asks eight short questions, promises a place number by email and uses one screen to ask who sent the person, so the list tells you which placements worked.

Two weeks out: place, print and post

Work down the placement list you wrote in week five. For a local food product it usually reads: stockists and cafes that have agreed to take samples, community noticeboards, the farmers market stall, the business listing on Google, and your own social accounts.

Print the poster and the range sheet at A4 for noticeboards and counters. Resize each design for the social sizes you will actually post, rather than cropping the A4 file, because a feed crops differently to a noticeboard.

Schedule a post on your Google Business Profile. Its help page lists three post types, updates, offers and events, where an offer needs a title, dates and a time. It also notes that posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set, so give the launch offer an end date and the listing will not keep advertising it next autumn.

The Saltmarsh Ceramics pop up shop flyers show one more thing worth doing now: answer the logistics question a local reader actually has. For a pop up it was whether the shop opens on a Sunday. For a new carton it is where to buy it on launch day.

Launch week: count, do not just celebrate

Launch week is when the list pays off. Email the waitlist with the date, the address or stockist and the single reason to come. If your trading hours change for the week, Google Business Profile’s special hours let you adjust hours for up to six days in a row without changing the regular hours, which is a launch week almost exactly.

Keep a tally. Samples out, orders in, sign ups by source. The “who sent you” answer from the form and the stockist named on each order are the only honest measure of which flyer placement did anything.

Post one real photo from the week: the first pallet, the first shelf, the first coffee made with it. A launch post with a real photo reads as news. The flyer image posted again reads as an advertisement.

After launch: the first fortnight

Ask the first buyers one question: what would make them reorder? Three questions is the ceiling for a busy cafe owner. The answers shape the second print run far better than a guess.

Then retire the launch offer on the date you printed. An offer that quietly keeps running after its stated end date teaches customers to ignore your dates. Update the flyers to remove the launch line and keep the claim, the facts and the stockist list.

A launch that went to a larger room, with investors or a regional buyer, often needs a deck as well as flyers. The product launch deck example is the same facts arranged for a meeting rather than a noticeboard.

The checklist at a glance

The table at the end of this article lists fourteen tasks by week, with the thing each one produces. The artifact column is the part to watch. If a task has no artifact, nobody can check it was done, and at a small business a task that was only discussed is how the sample docket goes missing.

Common mistakes

Designing before the facts are final. A reprint because the case price changed costs more than the week you saved.

Printing a claim the label cannot support. A buyer who reads “Australian” on the poster and a different statement on the carton stops trusting both.

One flyer for everyone. The shopper and the buyer need different information, in a different order.

No way to take names. A flyer without a form or a link is a notice. It cannot be followed up.

No end date on the offer. Open ended launch offers become the regular price in the customer’s mind.

Crowding the page. Everything a flyer needs, and what to leave out, is covered in what to put on a flyer.

Build it

The AI flyer generator page shows what the generator makes from a written description. Paste your fact sheet as the description. When you leave the template choice blank it returns two designs, and you can generate again for more. The model fills text, image prompts and icon names; it does not choose the layout, size, fonts or colours, and it is instructed not to invent prices, dates or statistics, so the facts you give it are the facts it uses.

There are eight canvas sizes, A4 portrait and landscape for print plus Instagram post, Instagram story, Facebook post, LinkedIn post, Facebook cover and Twitter header, and every design is authored for all eight, so resizing swaps in a native layout where one exists. Export comes as PDF, which includes every page, or PNG and JPG, which export the page you are on. An A4 page exports at 2480 by 3508 pixels. There is no bleed, no crop marks and no CMYK, so ask your printer how they want an RGB file supplied. After generation, the flyer AI chat can rewrite text in a slot or the title, which is useful when the price changes at week four. The steps inside the builder are in the guide to creating a flyer for Instagram and print, and the pixel sizes for each social format are listed on the Instagram sizes question page.