The Secret to the DTC brand Brooklinen’s Success in Furniture and Bedding
After a trip to Las Vegas, a couple discovered a business idea and started up a brand worth millions of dollars. How did they make it?
This couple visited Las Vegas and arrived at a hotel, plopped down on the bed, and found out the linens are so skin-friendly, comfortable, soft, and perfect for sleep.
They wanted to have the same bed sheet at home, but the hotel didn’t sell it. They searched several brands but found that the same quality bed sheet was quite expensive, nearly $800 for a piece. Why can’t people find a bed sheet that is comfortable and affordable?
The quality of home furnishing brands in the United States is often very good, but the prices are generally high, which runs counter to the younger generation’s demand for “simple, not too bad quality, and not expensive” products.
Surprisingly, a trip and a simple shopping demand led the couple to seize the pain point in the bedding market and embark on the “bed sheet entrepreneurship” journey, eventually founding the bedding brand that is worth tens of millions of dollars.
They are Rich Fulop and Vicki Fulop, founders of DTC brand Brooklinen.
“Quality is the key.”
Three years after its founding, sales climbed tenfold and funds raised ten million US dollars.
Rich Fulop and Vicki Fulop believe that Brooklinen’s product philosophy is simple, “ Quality is the key. The product must be of high quality. In addition, we produce it with high-quality materials. Lastly, we make every effort to provide products at reasonable prices.”
By focusing on basic designs and having its own partnership manufacturing, Brooklinen was able to avoid unnecessary design and intermediary expenditures while providing clients with comfortable products at a reasonable price.
Most of Brooklinen’s bed linen products are less than $250, and most of the toiletries, apparel, and home furnishings are less than $100. In addition to expanding their business online, they have built six offline in the United States.
In the beginning, Brooklinen only focused on making bed sheets. Two of Brooklinen’s star products, Luxe and Classic, are made of 100% OEKO-TEX certified long-staple cotton. The bed sheets are available in six sizes, whereas the pillowcases are available in two sizes. There are 14 color combinations. At present, thousands of customers have given five-star reviews on Brooklinen’s official website, and the product quality has been strongly recognized by consumers.
Brooklinen launched its crowdfunding campaign in 2014 and the goal was to raise only $50,000, but unexpectedly received $236,888 in pre-orders.
After being introduced in 2015, the bed linen products had a 10-fold spike in sales the following year, generating $25 million in revenue. It attracted more than 150,000 clients and secured a $10 million Series A investment in 2017. They continued to increase their sales year after year, achieving $200 million in revenue in 2019 and earning a $50 million Series B investment from Summit Partners in 2020.
“Focus on user experience.”
“Build a strong brand reputation.”
In the early days of the brand, Rich and Vicki developed a series of business plans based on extensive research. They wanted to know exactly who their product is intended for and how to reach them.
This couple asked about 500 target consumers via email and face-to-face interviews about the bedding they wanted and the price they were willing to pay. They even asked which blogs, magazines they read, and even coffee shops they visited.
Brooklinen places a high priority on gathering customer information and believes that doing so would enable it to identify the most popular products and adjust future offerings to better meet consumer needs.
Here are examples.
· Their target audiences aren’t really interested in embroidery, which happens to be an extremely expensive part of the product. Therefore, they were able to avoid include it into their designs
· Their customers are also less concerned if the sheets are made from more expensive organic cotton
· They are more concerned and interested in the softness of the product and make sure that they are really at a relatively reasonable price for the product
Customers will be broken down and analyzed based on location, gender, and time dimensions, and the customer data gathered will be used to increase the effectiveness of inventory management and develop sales strategies.
Customer data comes from two sources. The first part is from employees who serve customers. More than half of the employees in the company will interact with customers directly and provide various services; the second part is from the after-sales. When customers want to return products, employees will ask questions as to which product customers prefer and whether they prefer a certain design or color in mind.
Rich and Vicki believe that word-of-mouth marketing for building a brand is very important. In the early days, once the physical product and price were finalized, they drove the product around New York City to about 60 social media influencers, inviting them to try the product and share their experience online. Each set of sheets comes with a handwritten note explaining how the sheets are made and how they want to change the bedding industry.
Combining online and offline marketing
01 Placing advertisements in the subway
The founder’s wife Vicki used to work in the PR department and has a good understanding of advertising and marketing. Vicki believes that subway advertising can reach the attention of most people at a lower price. She hopes that the brand’s advertising materials will be creative and displayed in an authentic way. Therefore, most of Brooklinen’s creatives focus on presenting usage scenarios to catch the attention of target audiences, such as pictures of people eating and playing in bed.
02 Expand your reach through social media influencers
Nearly a year after the brand was established, they decided to engage with an influencer agency, Mediakix. Brooklinen commissioned the company’s Top 10 influencers in home design and lifestyle to show how they use Brooklinen products in the fashion home space.
The influencer marketing campaign generated a total of 1.6 million social media impressions, 2.1 million blog views, 140,000 YouTube video views, and 115,000 Instagram Stories views.
After experimenting with influencer marketing with good results, Brooklinen turned to pet bloggers, finding 10 pet bloggers with large followings on Instagram and other social media platforms. In addition to promoting online social media channels, their creatives were showcased for four weeks in a New York subway station.
03 Spotlight on Facebook & Instagram Ads
Brooklinen once spent 75% of its advertising budget on Facebook and Instagram, which is actually a standard practice for many DTC brands to increase awareness and improve product conversion rates. Brookliene’s slogan is very unified and revolves around the following 5 themes:
· Thousands of 5-star customer reviews they’ve received
· comments they received from media
· Year-round after-sales service guarantee
· The Internet’s Most Popular Bed Sheet Homes
· Promotional intensity
On Instagram, Brooklinen mostly uses creative images such as bloggers or models for advertising and promotion. They also launched a Boomerang advertisement. They believe that this type of advertising is short and can quickly attract users’ attention, and the materials placed can be intuitive. This unique ad strategy rapidly drew the attention of Instagram users by emphasizing the comfort of their products.
Brooklinen’s optimized Facebook and Instagram operations have acquired more than 280,000 fans on Facebook and more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, which not only forms a strong positive relationship with followers but also has a long-term influence on the business. The expansion of followers is quite essential in terms of influence.
Analysis by similarweb shows that Brooklinen’s monthly website visits are not low, with millions of visits in May, nearly half of which come from search traffic, which shows the huge effect of its brand influence.
We also learned that Brooklinen has also put a lot of effort into Google search optimization. Among the traffic brought by keyword search, 53.39% came from organic search and 46.61% came from paid search. Whether it is broad match keywords or highly competitive keywords, such as “Sheets”, “duvet covers”, “pillows” and other high-traffic search terms, Brooklinen is not afraid to invest in advertising to win keywords.
In this way, these common keywords can be more associated with the brand keyword “Brooklinen” to further consolidate and expand the brand influence.
In addition to the funnels mentioned above, Brooklinen also exerts its efforts in marketing methods such as Google text ads, Google display ads, and email marketing, and discovers a marketing plan that is a better fit for development through continuous attempts and iterations.
The core foundation of Brooklinen’s success stems from the founder’s in-depth research and investigation of users prior to establishing the brand, sufficient understanding of consumers, and put customer experience first. Since its establishment in 2014, it has insisted on continuously exploring various marketing channels and growing the Brooklinen brand following the market trends. This is not just the secret to the success of a DTC brand, but also the secret to the success of any brand in every industry.
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