Silvercut: November Revenue from $285K to $965K While Net Margin Rose 170%

Challenge

Silvercut makes personalised memorial jewellery. Each piece captures a memory, most often of a pet, so its owner can keep it close. The founder, Emil, built the brand on his own and ran the ads himself, and by 2019 it was doing more than $1M a year.

At that size the business had become too complex for one person. What had got him from zero to $1M (a small team, ads managed by the founder) would not get him to the next stage. That needed specialist teams for each channel, a real creative strategy, creative production at volume, and the ability to scale internationally.

What we did

We changed what the team optimised for. Margins tend to get squeezed as a brand scales, because you get more of whatever you optimise for, and most ad teams only look at revenue and ROAS. Net profit is the better target, but it is hard to track daily, and daily feedback is what a marketing team needs to make decisions. We set up Ordermetrics so we could see the effect of the campaigns on net margin every day, and protect margin while we scaled.

We raised creative testing volume and widened the angles. We tested dozens of creatives a week and ran almost 200 creative tests in a few months. The material came from several places: the founder, customer and influencer user-generated content, and our own creative team’s angles. We kept changing UGC creators, production companies and editors so the ideas would not converge.

We scaled internationally. The US jewellery market is crowded, and Silvercut already had a strong ROAS there thanks to its high order value. Cheaper CPMs and less competition elsewhere were the bigger opportunity. We tested more than 20 countries and 50 audiences, then moved the winners into worldwide campaigns. About two-thirds of spend ended up outside the US, and we started testing ads in local languages.

The brand helped too. The founder’s work on the customer experience, from the first ad to the unboxing, made customers less sensitive to price. That let Silvercut charge more and reach a higher order value than its competitors.

Results

• In the founder’s own words, November revenue went from $285k, when he ran the store himself, to $965k a year later.
• Net margin rose 170% from 2019 to 2020.
• Annual revenue grew from $1M in 2019 to over $3M in 2020.