Home › Testimonials › Kitchenary
Kitchenary on working with Dazzle Commerce
A US cookware brand with strong national demand and flat profit. Priya Raghavan on writing a brief to scale paid media and being told, politely, that it was the wrong thing to ask for.
PR
Reviewed by Priya Raghavan
eCommerce Director, Kitchenary
SECTOR
Home & Furniture
PLATFORM
Shopify & Amazon
MARKET
United States
ENGAGEMENT
16 weeks, ongoing
Several hundred SKUs, a healthy top line, and a shipping rule written when the range was small and light.
EXPERT VIEW
“Every order now carries its own delivery cost, which sounds like an accounting change and turned out to be the whole strategy. Volume held, the margin came back, and we stopped paying to ship heavy things a long way for nothing.”
Priya Raghavan · eCommerce Director, Kitchenary
Published with the client’s approval following the engagement review. The case study sets out how each figure below was measured.
- Before the call
Why they went looking for an agency
Revenue was the number we could see. Margin was the number we could not.
“Top line was up every quarter and profit had not moved in two years.”
The brief I wrote said scale paid media, because that is what you write when revenue is the number on the dashboard and margin is the number nobody has assembled. We had grown from a single-category cookware brand into a full kitchen range with several hundred SKUs, and the operating model underneath had never been revisited.
The pricing, the shipping rules and the channel decisions had all been made when the range was small and light. By the time I was writing that brief, none of those conditions were true any more.
Two years of growing revenue and flat profit. The two reports had never been put in the same view.
- First
What they had already tried
Including the one that taught us the wrong lesson for eighteen months.
“Two rounds of media restructuring with a previous agency, both of which improved the metrics we were looking at.”
We also raised the free-shipping threshold once, saw conversion drop within a fortnight, and rolled it straight back. That experience sat in the team’s memory as proof that our customers would not accept a higher threshold — which was the wrong conclusion drawn from a badly executed change, and it cost us a year and a half.
- Onboarding
The first ninety days, from their side
Three weeks of instrumentation before anything shipped.
Carriage, packaging, returns and marketplace fees assembled into one view, before a single campaign was touched.
“They rebuilt the profit and loss per order rather than per channel, and would not change anything on the site until they trusted the baseline.”
That meant pulling carriage, packaging, returns and marketplace fees into one view, which is less work than it sounds and had somehow never been done. They said the sequence up front rather than after we asked for it, which I have come to appreciate more than I did at the time.
You can read how they run the first thirty days. It is an accurate description of what happened here.
- The finding
What surprised them
Geography was the whole story, and nobody had split the data that way.
“Orders travelling more than two shipping zones cost roughly three times as much to deliver, and made up close to a third of our volume.”
Once that was visible, the campaign rankings inverted. Our best performers on revenue were among our worst on margin, and they were best performers precisely because they sold heavy items to far-away places. We had been buying our own worst orders, efficiently, for two years.
The second finding was quieter and just as expensive: our Amazon listings were priced independently of the store, so in several categories we were undercutting our own margin channel and paying a marketplace fee for the privilege.
A third of volume travelling more than two zones, at roughly three times the delivery cost. None of it visible in a per-channel report.
- Outcome
What changed
Measured against the same ninety-day period a year earlier, not against the month before the engagement started.
+38%
Contribution margin
Blended, net of carriage and returns
-21%
Blended acquisition cost
Across paid search, shopping and social
+12%
Repeat purchase rate
Measured on a 90-day window
9 wks
To payback
On the engagement fee
“Volume held. What changed is how much of it we kept.”
- Their advice
What they would tell another brand considering us
Offered as advice to a peer rather than praise for us.
“Give them the finance data on day one.”
We held ours back for a fortnight out of habit — not policy, habit — and a fortnight is exactly what it cost us. The analysis that changed our business was only possible because somebody eventually exported the carrier invoices, which is not a document anyone had ever asked a marketing team for.
- The criticism
What they would change
Every review on this site carries one of these. We publish them unedited.
“Raising the shipping threshold was the change we had already tried and failed at.”
Knowing that, I would have wanted the conversion work on how delivery terms are presented scheduled ahead of the threshold change rather than alongside it. As it was, both landed in the same fortnight and I spent two weeks waiting to find out whether we were repeating our own mistake in front of the board.
It worked. That is not the same as it having been comfortable, and the sequencing was avoidable.
- In summary
Rated highest, rated lowest
No stars. Reviews of our own business, hosted on our own site, are not independent and we are not going to dress them up as though they were.
RATED HIGHEST
Refusing to act before the reporting was trustworthy, and saying so in week one rather than week six. They also rejected the brief we wrote, which took more confidence than the previous two agencies had.
RATED LOWEST
Sequencing around the shipping threshold. The supporting conversion work should have landed ahead of the change rather than with it, given we had failed at exactly that change before.
- The work behind this review
What actually ran on this account
Four service lines, one team, one plan. Each links to how we run that service generally.
The full methodology, the baseline, the sequencing and what we would do differently.
Catalogue, pricing, the shipping model and channel health — the service that owned the change that mattered here.
Paid search, shopping and social, restructured to buy contribution margin rather than revenue.
Presenting new delivery terms early and specifically, so raising a threshold did not cost conversion.
One pricing policy across store and marketplace, replacing an unattended repricer.
The channels this ran on. No replatform was required, and none was proposed.
- More client stories
Other engagements, in their own words
Reviews are being published one at a time. Where a review is not live yet, the case study is the fuller account.
CLIENT REVIEW
A UK supplements brand that came to us planning to cut acquisition spend, and finished the quarter raising it.
CLIENT REVIEW
An appliance brand competing against its own resellers, where the returns and the price war shared a cause.
ALL REVIEWS
Every quote we publish, each sitting next to the work that produced it.
Revenue growing and profit standing still?
Start with the free audit. We will rebuild the numbers per order rather than per channel, show you what that changes, and tell you whether we are the right team to act on it.