How We Took a Brand from Zero to Hero and Achieved #130 on the Inc. 5000

The Brand & Their Challenge

Several years ago, a small women's jewelry and accessories boutique who had been struggling with growth for many years. After seeing some early successes on deal platforms like Living Social and Jane.com, she was able to move her small operation of our her basement and in to a 1200 square foot warehouse nearby.

However, quickly it became difficult to consistently generate the number of orders she needed to cover her fixed expenses and give her employees enough work to remain happy. She was great at product development and spotting new trends, but didn't have the marketing skills to reach new customers and relied heavily on third party sites to get awareness.

She reached out and we decided to become a growth partner. At the time, her sales were in the low 5 figures per month. She had an outdated website, hosted by Shopify and had not experimented with any paid ads. Over 95% of her revenue came from Jane.com and her results from those deals were inconsistent. It was also quite a manual process to create deals, track the sales, update inventory and then re-list the items again on the platform, because Jane.com didn't have any direct integration with Shopify.

Our Bespoke Growth Strategy for This Client

Giving the Brand a Voice

Our first step was to give the brand a bit more of a voice. It also needed to be updated to resonate with a more modern customer base. We knew we needed to expand beyond the inconsistent deal-based channels and that meant being able to speak to a new type of customer.

We understood how important it would be to get customers to continually come back and buy again. So a great customer experience was paramount.

To start, we re-branded everything with a new logo, color scheme, styling and even re-shot all of the product photos to include more lifestyle scenes and even short videos.

We also completely revamped the website with a new theme, on-site customer experience and merchandising that helped to leverage a better average order value.

Selecting Winning Products & Revamping the Catalog

The product catalog of the business was inconsistent and outdated. Most of the products were trending several years ago and the styles had moved on quickly. However, the business owner had some good relationships with manufactures and sourcing partners overseas and she was able to quickly obtain new samples for products that were more in-line with modern customer choices.

We began testing demand for new products with updated photography on the brand new website. Our goal was to find the winning products that were likely to account for the majority of her sales. The 80/20 rule proved to be very true for this brand in the long run. One of the products we found ended up accounting for 80% of her sales overall.

We learned quickly that accessories and not jewelry, were where customers seemed to be gravitating to more frequently. They also were much easier to photograph and advertise for, despite the jewelry being more cost-effective to ship and having slightly better margins.

Finding Channel-Market-Fit

In order to reach the level of scale to reach her goals, we had to find out where this new customer base was hanging out the most and the most cost-effective way to reach them. After testing several different channels, Facebook was the clear winner. We could consistently achieve a ROAS on a first-purchase basis that gave us a healthy margin with cash-flow to sustain investing in additional inventory for growth.

Facebook and Instagram routinely were hitting 4, 5 and even 6+ ROAS for our winning products.

After building out a great lifecycle marketing strategy, we also saw customers coming back to buy more products at a rate we hadn't seen before. We tested discounts and promotions that helped us expand our average order value, layer on additional products per order and create a lever to sell thru overstock inventory.

Scaling Up

Now that we could acquire first-time customers at a profitable cost, it was time to scale up. We began to increase our ad spend at a pace that our inventory could keep up with. We tested for new winning products and also began to work on designing and releasing updates and new versions of our existing winners.

We had to expand the team to keep up with the customer service and shipping demand in the small warehouse. Soon enough, the existing space wasn't large enough to store the inventory we needed to fulfill all of the orders coming in. The team scouted and found a new warehouse location nearby that was about 10x larger (13,500 square feet).

Sales went from $10-20k per month to over $10k per day in less than a year.

Expanding to Omnichannel

People were beginning to notice the brand. We even started to see the products 'out in the wild' at the grocery store or in local restaurants. With all of the demand creation we were doing at the top of the funnel on Facebook and Instagram, we wanted to also ensure we were capturing the demand for the brand's products on other channels.

We expanded our presence on Google. We began selling on Amazon. We also got the brand in to some big box retailers like Scheels and sold to hundreds of smaller B2B partners like gift shops, hospitals, local boutiques and more through a bespoke wholesale program.

Additionally, we expanded to the new social commerce platforms and built out an on-site social media creation and management team that worked in the new warehouse.

We also expanded our repeat customer strategy by introducing a new mobile app that gave customers a way to more easily shop from their smart phone. It gave us the ability to market to them on a 1st party basis. This further increased our repeat purchase rate and gave us the ability to run exclusive promotions and send push notifications to our most loyal customers.

Finally, we also started to leverage live selling on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This now accounts for a large portion of the brand's monthly revenue.

Results by the Numbers

In 2021, the brand was recognized as #130 on the Inc. 5000, a list of the fastest growing brands in the country. #130 was the not just in the top 500, but was the fastest growing company in the state of Utah. We took the company from low six figures per year to over $7,000,000 in topline revenue in 2 years - an over 40x growth rate!