E-commerce
Mission
The team at Bark have been incredible to work with. They grew our business x10 in 12 months and 90% our marketing budget was spent with them. Very responsive, will go the extra mile and see the bigger picture. Highly recommend to anyone looking to scale fast from the start.
Tom Whittle, Founder
The Situation
We started working with Tom Whittle, the founder of Mission, back in April 2020 when he was having to pivot his business to online only in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic breaking out in March.
He had developed a range of teas designed to enhance your physical and mental performance using all natural ingredients, with a focus on endurance athletes such as cyclists and runners.
As 50% of his revenue had been coming from meeting his prospective customers at events for runners, cyclists and triathletes, he needed to make the eCommerce side of his business scale as fast as possible.
BARK was brought in to help advise on the transition of his acquisition from focussing on gathering leads through sampling to a pure DTC eCommerce strategy, where the goal was to convert prospects into subscribers or bundle customers.
The Brief
BARK took full ownership of Facebook and Google as performance channels, with the goal of achieving a profitable cost per purchase from the outset before scaling the spend gradually in order to achieve ambitious revenue goals in 2020.
BARK were also brought on to advise on changes to pricing, product strategy, and the website UX, with the goal of improving the conversion rate and average order value in order to make the unit economics work.
The Approach
The first step was to gain a deep understanding of where Mission was as a business, with the main challenge making the shift from a lead generation strategy built around free samples to pure DTC eCommerce.
As Mission is a repeat purchase based business, the strategy we wanted to move to was built around promoting an initial discovery bundle, which introduces the customer to the full range of products at a low cost, with the idea that they would come back and buy their favourites again on subscription. Marketing this product at low scale allowed us to prove the concept, before scaling up spend and then investing in improving the overall site to make the proposition better.
After a couple of months of working with Tom, the founder, to iterate on the website we managed to get conversion rate and average order value into a place where we could acquire customers at break even initially with the bundle products, with the subsequent repeat purchases allowing us to make the CAC:LTV ratio work for the long term.
Once the unit economics were in a good place, we were then able to start scaling the marketing more aggressively on Facebook and Google in the UK and Europe, leading to a 10x increase in monthly revenue by the end of 2020.
We continued to help Mission scale their range of products through into 2021, achieving growth that helped them to raise £1.6 million in seed investment to to keep scaling the business aggressively.