How I boosted a D2C start-up’s traffic by 1000%
It was 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, a new medical face mask company in Hong Kong; called Airizy, entered the market to sell high quality luxury face masks. The market was full of new companies vying for market share as there was a mask mandate in place and everyone needed to wear a mask, creating a lucrative new market. Airizy needed a concrete way to cement themselves with a core group of loyal customers, great brand positioning and a marketing angle that they could own.
The Market
There were already three strong market leaders in the luxury mask space:
Competitor 1 : Mask On
With large investment into retail space in high-end malls and other luxury brick and mortar retail location, they built their brand through aligning themselves with traditional high fashion brands such as Dior, Channel, Hermes. Their marketing followed suit, emulating the style of these fashion brands, with expensive photo shoots and high-class messaging. The concept was simple:
If you wear Dior, Hermes, Channel or Rolex, you should use Mask-On masks.
Competitor 2 : Mask Lab
Co-founded by owners of a melt-blown fabric producer, they were the first to market with masks that had different colours and patterns. Their sales grew rapidly as they benefitted from a monopoly on high-quality consumer masks, which they invested into being able to produce many different styles and sizes of masks in many different colours and patterns. They leaned on this bringing out ever increasing products, eventually collaborating with other creators and brands to create masks with their designs. They would then feature all of these products in their giant stores, bursting with variety and colour. Their concept was:
With so much variety and shapes, only Mask Lab has that perfect mask to express your individuality.
Competitor 3 : #lovewithoutborders (New World Group)
Created by billionaire Adrian Cheng, #lovewithoutborders started off as a charitable endeavor to donate masks to the various organizations that needed them. No one really knew about these masks, or their charitable story until one day, a simple vending machine selling high-quality masks with a small “A” logo in the corner turned up in the luxury malls that Adrian owned. With messaging that highlighted the charitable aspects of the brand, these masks became a symbol of caring and community overnight. Their high price was justified in their charitable aspect, and the small A logo was a sign of it noble cause. However, Adrian was smart, the masks that were sold in the machines were different to those that were donated, so people could tell who were receiving them for free, and who could afford the sky high prices for these daily necessities. Their concept was:
If you are rich (like Adrian the billionaire) and want people to know how much you care, wear #lovewithoutborders
The Problem
Being a start-up, the initial marketing budget was low. The luxury mask market was saturated, and to be able to muscle in on this space would require bringing a fresh angle that could not be copied by the big players, no matter how much money they threw at it.
Looking at the positioning of the big three, they had already owned three themes, Luxury (Mask-On), Variety (Mask Labs), Philanthropy (#lovewithoutborders). We knew that we could not compete on any of these marketing angles, as even if we succeeded we would always be compared to our competitors. We needed our own angle.
The Solution
Finding the angle started with understanding the consumer. Understanding the consumer meant boiling down the product to its core interactions and functions. We took the mask and wrote out a list of every single function and aspect that we could think of that would influence a customer’s decision to buy
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Finding the angle started with understanding the consumer. Understanding the consumer meant boiling down the product to its core interactions and functions. We took the mask and wrote out a list of every single function and aspect that we could think of that would influence a customer’s decision to buy
1. Visual style
2. Construction (Physical Style of the Mask, EG: Tri-fold, Duck Bill, etc)
3. Comfort
4. Breathability
5. Protection (Protective qualities against airborne particles)
6. Brand
7. Packaging
8. Where it's Made (Location of production facilities)
9. Friend's Choice (Influence of family and friends)
10. Sustainability
11. Philanthropy (Charitable aspects of the mask, EG: every mask bought, one is donated to a hospital)
12. Odour
13. Ease of Speaking while wearing the mask.
From this we created a simple survey that asked people to choose the 5 most important things out of this list that they thought was the most important when choosing a mask. These were the results:
With brand, comfort and visual style leading the pack, this emulated the positioning of two of the market leaders, Mask-On and Mask Lab. Interestingly, Charitable aspects was not high on the list of results, suggesting that #lovewithoutborders main appeal was its brand, being associated with Adrian Cheng the billionaire.
The next 4th highest response was protective qualities. Initially the assumption that masks needed to be worn from the mask mandate proved to be false, people were genuinely concerned about the protective qualities of the mask as well. While all 3 of the market leaders also advertised their protective qualities, they did this only by showing the various certificates they have achieved for their products, namely the ASTM levels, 1 being the lowest, 3 the highest.
Another surprise option, coming in at 5th place was location of production. Through further questioning of people who found this aspect important, it was found that there had been tabloid articles about masks being created in unsanitary factories, mainly in China. People preferred masks that were made in Japan or Korea, as it was deemed of a higher production standard and quality.
From these results, we knew how we were going to create a stand-out brand and marketing angle, by leaning into the protective qualities. The concept was:
If you want to look good, and be sure you are protected, wear Airizy.
The Execution
While it may be easy to identify the marketing angle, the execution has to be something that only airizy can accomplish. Afterall, if you were to, for example, pay for ads that simply tout Airizy’s ASTM Level 3 status, competitors would simply do the exact same thing and beat Airizy out with their larger budgets. This is where the second finding from our survey fit into the puzzle. People cared where the masks were produced, Airizy, being a start-up was in the prime position to be able to market this effectively.
Airizy was a start-up with the office in the same space as the production facilities. It would be very easy for the marketing team to access the production areas, create content, and show customers the cleanliness and technology behind the Airizy Product. Other competitors with their large operations had separate office and production spaces, it would be very hard for them to replicate the same kind of content.
To round it all off, Airizy also had the help of a professor of microbiology at the local university as part of their advisory board.
This was executed over 3 key channels:
Website content and blogs
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Long format articles that aimed to answer SEO backed keyword search queries and questions related to safeguarding yourself from covid 19, with a focus on the function, creation and science behind face masks.
Socials
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Sharing of infographics or data gathered when creating blogs.
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Sharing of interesting scenes from within the mask factory, highlighting aspects of safety and cleanliness
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Sharing of new products
Direct mailing campaign
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Sharing of new blogs
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Sales promotions.
The Results
Using this marketing angle and content core, Airizy was able to leverage their unique marketing positioning to create a strong web traffic to email sign ups to sales pipeline. In the first 3 months of operation, web traffic increased by 10x two times to 10,000 unique monthly visitors, which was converted to eventually 100,000GBP sales in the 12th month of the first year of operation.
Airizy went on to use this marketing plan to maintain a market presence, and eventually sold the company in 2022.