Larsson & Jennings is a direct to consumer watch and jewellery brand based in London, fusing a contemporary style with scandinavian aesthetic. Having had strong influencer driven growth in the early years of their business, they approached us to to help grow their revenue further with Facebook advertising.
With more favourable unit economics and a greater total addressable market in the US, their main priority was to shift focus from the UK market and grow sales in the US to help improve saleability of the business. We achieved this by growing total US sales from 16% to 60% of overall revenue. This increase in predictable revenue growth eventually helped the brand owner achieve a lucrative exit on favourable terms.
The dreaded iOS 14 update rolled out during our engagement with Larsson & Jennings, which combined with an existing multi-channel marketing mix, forced us to adapt quickly to measure paid media performance to make scaling decisions in the account. The first step was to move away from measuring paid social performance from looking at on platform FB ROAS to measuring new customer MER instead.
Using Rockerbox, we were able to use their multi-channel attribution reporting to measure ad level performance by analysing the normalized revenue and estimated ROAS metrics.
With a high AOV (10%) and a lack of data in the account, it became imperative to obtain a high creative success rate to conserve spend. We initially focused on promoting the best selling SKUs in the most popular variants, then took the creative concepts that worked (like point of view wrist shots, influencer promos and polaroid shots) and used winning creative concepts to promote the less popular SKUs and variants. That way we could grow the revenue without being dependent on just one best selling product.
To grow the sales in the US, we firstly re-calculated the unit economics with Larsson & Jennings to factor in additional shipping costs with the VAT payable on US sales subtracted. We were then able to work out a blended new customer MER target assuming a constant majority of US sales. Then by applying rules and cost caps on the account, we were able to pace the ad spend so that the majority of the adspend would be delivered in the US later in the day as we approached peak UK traffic (around 4pm onwards). This was important as US AOV and profitability was higher so we needed to ensure most of the marketing spend was utilized there.
Our creative testing strategy revolved around Beta Typing our creatives, starting out with research, forming hypotheses about which concepts could convert, testing and evaluating the results, then producing iterations based of elements from our winning creative tests.
We started out testing varied creative concepts such as POV wrist shots, lookbooks, slideshows, carousels, unboxings and flat lays. We combined these winning elements to produce creative iterations to increase our predicted creative success rate.
Since the creative production and media buying were under a single roof for us, we were able to iterate on winning creatives quickly as we could establish a feedback loop between our growth strategist and production team (who sit 10 meters away from each other!).
As spend increases, creatives start to fatigue so it’s important to keep refreshing creatives fast to maintain ROAS and profitability. We were able to go from an idea and hypothesis, into a shot and edited creative in the account within 14 days.
Larsson & Jennings especially liked this setup as they were able to supplement our production with their existing organic creative, and only needed to communicate with a single agency for their paid social efforts.
Maintaining brand consistency for fashion brands and designing creative for performance can be a challenging dichotomy to manage alongside an organic and influencer seeding marketing mix.
Fast transitions and product focused visuals are imperative to maintain attention on the newsfeed but can often fall out of line with the brand guidelines. To bridge this gap, we created a Performance Creative Brand Guide with Larsson & Jennings to ensure our creatives stayed on brand, but also were direct response focused and engaging to convert viewers into sales.
Finding the right offer during periods to help boost sales without tarnishing the brand image was important to capatalize during seasonal periods. We found that testing a 30% off + a free bangle offer outperformed the 40% off sitewide offer, which was especially beneficial as the unit economics were more favourable offering the smaller discount and free bangle. During evergreen periods, we found that offering a free bangle with any watch was more profitable than just offering the watch even with the additional COGS factored into the free bangle.
Pre-iOS 14 we evaluated the offer tests by using Facebook’s A/B testing function and comparing on platform ROAS for each offer. After the iOS 14 update, we still continued to use the A/B testing function, but instead evaluated the test by comparing the relative volume of coupon codes (that were exclusive to our campaigns only).
Further drill down analysis in Rockerbox allowed us to compare relative ad level ROAS to determine which specific ads for each sale were driving the best results.
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"I’ve worked with 3 agencies in the past with minimal results, so when I was recommended Venture Beyond by one of their clients - it was very refreshing to finally work with an agency who was proactive, always chasing me and my team and on top of our account. With them producing creative and buying media under one roof, they’ve been able to quickly iterate on winning creatives to help grow my brand."
Andrew Jennings
Founder, Larsson & Jennings
