Scaling up eComm & B2B hybrid Merchery’s business with ads

About the client

Merchery is a Belgian company founded by two budding entrepreneurs, Simon & Benoit. They started the company to rid the world of low quality promotional items and corporate gifts.

Merchery allows companies to access premium brands and turn them into customized corporate swag. Organizations can then use these high end products to give to employees or use for corporate gifts.

Simon & Benoit focused on forging premium partnerships with brands like Patagonia, Yeti, Montblanc, Moleskin, & dozens more. They then optimized their supply chains and fulfillment.

They just needed to scale across Europe & North America

The problem

Merchery built an in incredibly strong team of designers, operators, and an effective logistics network. However, they needed a paid acquisition partner to help them scale Merchery all across Europe and America.

We partnered with them as we had an experience working with European brands in the past, and understood their unique hybrid model that combines eCommerce & B2B.

Merchery needed to identify:

• Which markets had the biggest growth opportunities
• Which countries had the best product-market fit
• Which countries has the most efficient cost per acquisition

Within the first 3 months of working together, Artifex launched Meta & Google Ads in 16 different countries in 8 different languages.

We had to deal with:

• Coordinating translations of ad copy
• Creating multiple variants of ads with text overlay to match the local language
• Designing ad account structures that effectively siloed each country’s performance
• Measuring acquisition costs & efficiency on a country-by-country basis
• Effectively handling the sheet complexity of such an ad structure

It was a massive job that involved a huge up-front time investment.

But once the infrastructure was set, Merchery was primed for success.

The solution

We built out effective systems for copywriting translation into the many different languages as well as working with designers to coordinate ad copy on image & video ads themselves.

We also built a custom dashboard for Merchery so we could, at any time, track the efficiency of each country’s acquisition and adjust budgets accordingly.

We also helped Merchery uncover novel findings about their target markets, allowing them to focus their org’s attention on countries they previously thought were not relevant to them.

The paid program became the testing ground for their business and their B2B sales team. Paid was able to identify where Merchery should be investing its resources as it’s impossible to serve 14 countries equally.

We made sure they focused on the most profitable ones.

We also built out a tracking system that ensured their leads were tracked all the way to closed deals in Hubspot.

We didn’t stop our measurement at leads or phone calls, we made sure that we were able to tie our ads efforts back to closed revenue.

At Artifex we:

• Tripled the size of Merchery’s ad program
• Helped them grow top-line revenue consistently each quarter for 17 months
• Identified Merchery’s top performing geos, allowing them to deploy full time sales people in those countries as well as setup satellite offices
• Helped deign and scale an ad program with a high degree of complexity that we were eventually able to hand off to their team

Their ads look great too.