Category: Power brands

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Partnerships Power brands SMM

The Normal Company partners with The Hut Group

The Normal Company is thrilled to announce a partnership with The Hut Group (THG), and their word-class tech and e-commerce infrastructure that powers their brands, and also supercharges other retailers looking for global growth, at speed.

Best in class for tech, infrastructure, fulfilment and operations at scale, THG is the brand owner of considerable e-commerce giants such as MyProtein, Illamasqua and ESPA, online marketplace owner for the likes of Lookfantastic and Coggles, and has long term e-commerce centric partnerships with Coca-Cola, Hotel Chocolat, and Nuxe to name just a few.

THG owned and partnered brands

A considerable partnership for The Normal Company, allowing THG’s Digital Strategy and portfolio of brands to have access to The Normal Company for end to end paid advertising, and fully managed digital solutions when it comes to our media buying capabilities which include primarily Facebook, Google and TikTok Advertising strategies and fully managed execution for e-commerce brands.

With our performance marketing expertise, and the vast demand for such expertise from The Hut Group’s brands, marketplaces and partners, it has made for a natural synergy between entities, to assist and manage the end-to-end servicing for clients with paid advertising.

Additionally, our clients now have direct access through this partnership to a world class fulfilment partner. Logistical support, warehousing scale, top tier e-commerce platform builds fully backed and managed by THG.

THG Ingenuity is the end-to-end platform that The Hut Group has built in order to service their own 80 brands and marketplaces, as well as long-term partners depicted below.

THG owned and partnered brands

The premise is simple; by bringing absolutely everything in house within THG, it cuts costs and lead times, thus making everything easier for brands who are serious about mass scale, and best in class fulfilment to get to the next level.

Regardless of what a brand needs, the THG Ingenuity structure allows brands to get it right, with the very best.

With 16 years of global direct-to-consumer expertise, driven from proprietary tech, operations, brands and data, THG has the solution that eliminates all disproportionately expensive third-party technology providers, and seamlessly allows for the integration of everything needed end to end. Now, THG is the partner of choice for the world’s leading brands and those looking to grow at a global scale.

Having scaled THG’s own brands into global market leaders who drive over $2bn of annual sales, THG Ingenuity as a service and platform, is the proven peer-to-peer service provider able to solve business growth challenges and growth ceilings brands fall victim to at both a global and local level.

We are extremely excited to officially be working with THG, and integrating our expertise at The Normal Company with theirs, to assist one another with brand growth on an all encompassing format.

Categories
Brand Fashion Power brands

Skimming over the Success: SKIMS by Kim Kardashian

Within 24 months, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand has been built up into a $1.6 BILLION company.

In this blog post we are going to skim over SKIMS, and what has made the label such a success in a short space of time.

SKIMS launched in 2019 and instantly sold out of all stock at the time. In the past, Kim had loved wearing shapewear but realized there was a huge void when she couldn’t find anything that really worked for her. 

In turn, this created her market.

According to Grandview Research, the global shapewear market size was estimated at USD 2.26 billion in 2018 and is projected to expand at a CAGR of 7.7% from 2019 to 2025.

Kim had experimented with a lot of shapewear before launching her own brand, most of it probably coming from Spanx.

Kim identified her market fit, and brought a twist to this market. She offered unique colors of shapewear, plus-sizes, and the shapewear was made to compliment women’s outfits, and not so much to shape one’s body. 

A product she clearly wanted, which didn’t quite exist for her own personal needs. She harnessed her social prowess to catapult it to where it is, yes..

However, the products really do hold their own when you look across the board within women’s fashion. 

They have visible USP’s, interesting colour ways which stay true to Kim’s personal colour palette, and they offer a unique angle not exploited by other brands that sell shapewear.

 

After rinsing through their custom-coded website, stats for those who like to get ‘nerdy’ on the back end: 

After heading to their best-seller section, We found the average price of their top 4 best-selling products is $30. They also offer free USA shipping on orders over $75. Based on this, we would predict that their AOV is in the $60-70 range.

It’s high-quality shapewear, but at a reasonable price when benchmarking against the likes of Zara’s AOV. It fits in well with mid-tier brands, but with a ‘luxury’ touch, as it embodies Kim.

This makes for an easy impulse buy sale. Kim could have easily taken a steer from Kanye’s ever succesful Yeezy, and hit price points which could take her AOV beyond $100, as her name can pretty much do as she pleases, however when it comes to the scale she is seeing, it’s easy to see why when priced so competitively, and with it fitting in with the impulse buy notion. 

According to SimilarWeb, SKIMS receives 3.7M monthly visits to their website.

What’s next, is the most interesting part to take away from SKIMS success.

Let’s predict SKIMS’ revenue with our simple equation:

5M website visits x 2.5% CVR = 125,000 orders/month 125,000 x $60 AOV = $7,500,000 revenue per month!

But remember, Q4 and BFCM weekend is a whole different story for ecom businesses. We would estimate a $10m minimum month for the brand across Nov & Dec.

Not bad, Kim!

According to NY Times, SKIMS reported $145 million in sales during 2020, and expects to roughly double sales to $300 million this year in 2021, and based on the data we are seeing, we also expect this to hold true. 

$150M in one year, selling simple shapewear and comfy loungewear.

Categories
facebook ads IOS14 Power brands

WANT TO SOLVE YOUR IOS14 TROUBLES? DO THIS. TODAY.

This is a general announcement we have sent out to all of our brands today following recent updates from Facebook, and additional learnings we have seen over the past couple of days as we continue to stay at the very forefront of the environment for our brand partnerships benefit

We also thought we should make this a blog post for two reasons..

1. This stuff is killer content and deserves to be put out there, so why not.

2. Navigating ios14 has been a battlefield for everyone these past couple of months. In particular, we want to help the smaller brands that may not be able to afford an expert agency that has access to this type of information, and could really do with it to just stay afloat and survive in such times. We know it can help, and hopefully it does!

There are two main points to raise as an initial FYI:

1. IOS adoption has went up significantly with their latest forced IOS 14.6 update causing a higher opt-out rate causing a decrease in performance.

2. Starting June 30th, Facebook have CONFIRMED a positive update will be taking place. Facebook shall be expanding their use of conversion modelling to include it in their 7 day click default attribution setting. The inclusion of these new modelled conversions may result in a noticeable increase in 7-day click conversions, and overall ad account performance. Facebook are continuing to improve their machine learning models and expand their coverage of these new modelled conversions, in order for the platform to have greater transparency, of which has largely been lost of late, impacting our capabilities to scale budgets effectively.

With point 2, we certainly see a light at the end of the tunnel. The next few weeks will be bumpy but hopefully we’ll see a drastic improvement in July as anticipated since March.

In line with the above, we wanted to share what is working right now and shed light on a case study which could be modelled similarly for your brand..

The clients who are performing significantly well right now are releasing either new offers, promotions, collections/product ranges or re-structuring their offer/landing pages/sales process.

One brand of which has already hit $400k this month, due to some revamping and restructuring of offers.
A lot of this is driven by a sale that finishes end of this month.
They also don’t run sales often so the urgency/desire is very much real, and has caused a stir with their audience who want to fully take advantage of this FOMO inducing campaign.

It’s worth us mentioning that a nice portion of these returns have come from our email campaigns we put in place (money is, has been and always will be in the list long term – this is fully owned by you, and is one of the biggest assets a brand can have when software companies take the control away with such things like ios14). A well nurtured email list will always be a good weapon against change. (Of course with $0 attributed marketing spend to any returns seen here is also a huge plus point)

Here is a separate campaign which went out today for a completely different brand, which goes down a ‘secret sale’ avenue, with added benefits for taking part – something this brand has also never done, so causes high intrigue and uptake.

 

A lot is changing right now and we need to lean into it in every form we can.

– Borders, the world, physical businesses all opening back up

– Weather globally is getting warmer so less time spent online. General market seasonality always seen at this part of the year. 

– Money being spent locally again instead of online.

Therefore, creativity will play a huge level of importance this month…

We suggest to find genuine reasons to run sales, promos or campaigns right now to boost conversion rate and sales:

1. Fathers day

2. Summer sales

3. Revenge travel hype 

4. Flash sale (72 hours/1 week only) 

Evergreen is 100% taking a hit right now. It’ll only get worse before it gets better, so we are encouraging as above, to get creative with your strategies to make the most out of what we can right now, and drive performance to be as high as it can. 

*Photo of brand performance for June thus far – can clearly see when the campaigns went live*

 

 

We would encourage you to utilise this information as much as possible, and use it to get creative with how your brand could strategise this period.

 

Extra point of notice: 

We have noticed performance drop offs across accounts on 1st June. Since then there has been over a 40% increase of users updating to IOS14.5. Adoption rates are increasing fast as you can see: 

Therefore, this really is a time to be thinking different, rather than sitting around hoping to ride the wave.

Your ROAS will continue to be in a downtrend, your marketing budget will be stretched thin, and ultimately you will be leaving opportunity on the table.

We hope this helps, not only to help your brand survive ios14 and the multiple updates Apple are putting out there onto brands, but ultimately we hope this helps your brand thrive, and outpace your competition in such volatile times.

 

 

Categories
Brand Fashion Power brands

Like A Phoenix: How Puma rose from the ashes.

Puma. A brand we are all familiar with. Founded in 1948, they have been an ever-present in the sports scene, adorning sports shops worldwide and boasting heavy endorsement deals over the past 3 decades in multiple industries. 

For Puma, basketball was and still is, a key facet of their brand.

However, their first attempt at the lucrative scene of NBA fell way short of competitors, and sent Puma down the pecking order of consumers minds, against the likes of Nike and Adidas, who conquered for years.

Before Nike popped up onto the scene, Puma was the power player, almost untouchable as they represented some of the NBA’s top players at the time.

They had one small issue with this however, much like a lot of current brands in today’s market with keystone influencers and the marketing budget allocated to human endorsement; They couldn’t turn a profit on this area.

And so they shut down the division, enabling Nike & Adidas to take over and storm the market, whereby you’ll still find around 75% of NBA players wearing Nike shoes when they enter court.

More importantly, as NBA increased in popularity, Nike’s brand thrived financially as they ride the wave of basketball popularity and fan-demonium.

Nike US Revenue

  • 1990: $2B
  • 2000: $5B
  • 2010: $8B
  • 2019: $16B

Here’s a key take away from this that you may not have known: The basketball shoe business isn’t a lucrative one when it comes to profits. The typical profit margin within this sector all things accounted for is just a 5% profit margin. This proves that for the power players who have been around for generations, it’s all about the cultural influence (which is leverage and huge brand equity in consumers minds), rather than making quick returns on the short term.

With revenue dropping sharply by 10% from 2012-2014, Puma knew changes were needed, and fast to remain competitive.

Who did Puma seek out first to join them on this climb?

None other than Rihanna herself.

Rihanna was named creative director of Puma Women. With women’s sales ramping up a heavy 92%, Puma saw immediate results from the introduction of RiRi, to no surprise. Of course, the brand leverage from this was also something to be accounted for. 

Did they stop there?

No, Puma had their sights on taking things back to where they wanted to be within the basketball arena. To do this, they looked to someone of equal measure when it comes to influence, a true G.O.A.T by the name of Jay Z.

Given his cultural appeal and connection to sports biggest stars through Roc Nation, it was a no-brainer for the brand to bring in such a mogul.

Thereafter, Jay Z became the new Creative Director of Puma Basketball. Upon this announcement, one of his conditions was that he wanted a Puma Jet.

No biggie.

Jay felt that creating a fully Puma branded private jet would set the brand apart, and of course it did just that.

The brand wasn’t playing around, fully investing into every facet possible to ramp up brand image, set itself apart from the competition, and launch an attack on the markets it wanted to be a big player within.

They even personalized the tail number for Jay Z:

  1. N: Country code
  2. 444: Jay-Z’s album title
  3. SC: Shawn Carter

It’s not just a gimmick either, players routinely mentioned their ability to use the “Puma Jet” as an advantage.

Word was getting around, and Puma were becoming a heavy hitter once again, and no longer in the shadows of Nike and Adidas.

Where they could have easily backed down or tried to get on a level with competition, Puma always went one step further, attempting to break the market and leapfrog competition to be the best they possibly can be, crafting their own image, on their own terms for domination of their sector.

Outside of basketball, Puma has routinely continued to delve into celebrity image. Recent brand partnerships from celebs range from The Weeknd, right through to Victorias Secret model Adriana Lima.

From Victorias Secret they then go to other sports, notably F1 and Football with Lewis Hamilton and Neymar Jr.

This for us, proves the point that standing alone, doing different and thinking different, leads to different results. Brands can learn a whole lot from Puma’s approach when it comes to endorsement and driving up company profits and value. The message is clear; think outside of your current thought sphere, and delve into new spaces.

Still in doubt? 

Here’s the figures..

After seeing their annual revenue decline for two consecutive years, Puma’s all out celebrity strategy has skyrocketed their growth to phenomenal levels.

Revenue 2012-2014: $3.8B to $3.5 (decline)

Revenue 2014-2019: $3.5B to $6.5

Oh and also, their stock has gone from $22 to $99, and rising.

Today, with the focus on cultural influence embodying the brand, Puma is now more relevant than ever before, proving that when a brand can pivot and reach out to new areas, it can often pay off if the execution is strong.

This shift for Puma changed the direction for their entire brand, and for the better as they are poised to remain a heavy hitter in multiple industries for many more decades.