Long term growth through brand and performance marketing
Van Der Hout Jewelry is a direct-to-consumer fine jewelry business that began as a sole proprietorship in 2017. By 2019, the Van Der Hout team wanted to take the brand to the next level and become a multi-million dollar brand.
At the beginning of Rebel & Thorn’s engagement, Van Der Hout faced the following challenges:
While very successful in Toronto and the GTA, Van Der Hout had very limited exposure to the US or other international markets as well as other areas of Canada.
Media was bootstrapped, so an efficient cost per customer acquisition was essential in order to continue investing in media
The Van Der Hout team was focused on making great products which left limited bandwidth for creating a data ecosystem and website that would support significant brand growth
Rebel & Thorn completed a thorough audit of Van Der Hout’s existing website and reporting systems and made recommendations for how to best launch their media campaign. Because the campaigns were bootstrapped, we had to ensure the most efficient possible use of media dollars.
The first quarter of the campaign in Q4 2019 drove a positive ROAS, but was still not profitable for Van Der Hout. It cost almost the basket value of the first purchase to acquire a customer, which was more than VDH was willing to spend.
In 2020, we re-focused the media spend on growing VDH’s customer base within more established areas while still devoting a smaller segment of the budget toward prospecting. This change as well as other optimizations resulted in a 20% increase in ROAS and a 30% reduction in customer acquisition cost. We also worked with them to implement a new brand look and feel alongside a new website to ensure that the customer experience was as consistent as possible.
In 2021, VDH had a more aggressive ROAS goal, so we shifted spend from prospecting to hone more proven strategies. This strict focus on ROAS resulted in a 41% improvement vs 2020 and a 70% improvement vs 2019. Customer acquisition cost also went down by 19% year over year.
During Rebel & Thorn’s media buys, Van Der Hout more than tripled their revenue and number of transactions, driven largely by first-time buyers.