Bleach London Achieve 600% Revenue Growth with FordeBaker in 6 Months

Bleach London hired us to take control of their product offerings on Amazon and navigate the complexities of wrestling back control from resellers and creating unique strategies that improved margins and ultimately significantly increased revenue – which we did by 600% in 6 Months.

Opportunity

Bleach London came to FordeBaker with an impressive suite of high-quality hair care products with solid branding, but despite this, the brand was falling way short of what they would expect to achieve on a platform as big as Amazon.

One of the issues the brand faced was that it allowed resellers of their products to not only sell its products on Amazon but also to own listing content, and this diluted their brand and, more importantly, gave customers a poor experience and further hindered the consistency of the brand on an all-important sales channel.

In addition, the brand needed to diversify its Amazon product portfolio, with 61% of product sales of Bleach London products being generated by only 6 ASINs, 3 of which they did not actively sell on Amazon (all of which were multipack sets.)

The brand faced over 50 resellers dominating the crucial Amazon buy box across multiple ASINs, resulting in issues concerning the ability to control prices.

Although these issues posed a problem, they also presented a great opportunity. If Bleach London could address legacy reseller activity, it could yield significant results in a short period.

Bleach set out objectives for us to reach an 80% buy box win rate across the bestseller resellers that were selling on Amazon.

The brand wanted to move from a standing start to 5-figure monthly sales within the first 6 months, then to increase sales by 2.5X in the second half of the year.

Alongside this, the brand wanted to revamp the customer experience on their listings on Amazon to rectify the issues caused by resellers and to align it with the brand look, feel and tone.

Solution

We formulated a robust business case with the detail to persuade the brand of its merits, then worked closely with them to operationalise the plan – from strategy to execution. This included helping the brand set up internal processes, work with their logistics team and preparing the wider business to meet Amazon’s FBA compliance requirements.

During our research and analysis of the current product range on Amazon, we discovered that multipack sets were popular across the wider category. This was not something the brand offered elsewhere in its omnichannel strategy and presented a great opportunity.

Capturing Demand

For the first six months, we focused on capturing demand, these best sellers were made of multipack sets and some hero products. Bleach London has an extensive product portfolio, but instead of stretching resources thinly across a broader range of products, we took advantage of the listings that had been set up by resellers, which also already had a significant sales history and a large number of reviews.

If we could focus on winning the buy box across these products, it would be the quickest and most efficient way to capture demand, start seeing sales and build up revenue for the brand.

After this was achieved we could then focus on making the wider Bleach London range more visible on Amazon.

Profitability & FBA

Switching to FBA would be vital to helping us achieve the buy box objective, but first, we needed to improve profitability to make FBA a viable option. The higher RRP of the multipack sets allowed us to increase the average order value by 35%. A similar increase in the client’s profitability resulted in FBA becoming a viable option.

Our research revealed the prevalence of shoppers wanting to buy product multipacks. So we set up offers on these listings with this knowledge of the Amazon consumer. We also made this a prime focus when we launched new products/ranges on Amazon and created multipacks of products where relevant.

This also increased our average order value and the profitability of each sale – only having to pay one FBA fee for the set rather than the individual FBA fee per product.

Repricing, Brand Consistency & Brand Defence

We set up repricing rules to help us remain competitive with resellers. The goal of this was to increase our buy box win rate. So, for example, setting minimum prices of £0.50 below the RRP and the rule automatically decreasing prices £0.01 below competitors meant that Bleach London was always the most competitively priced to help improve chances of winning the buy box.

Increasing our buy box win rate meant we could control the listing, optimise content and create a more uniform look across Bleach London products that reflected their brand voice/image on other channels.

In addition, we set up brand defence advertising campaigns – bidding on the brand name helped us gain authority of the buy box in the early stages and also meant strengthening the brand’s presence on Amazon.

Result

In a six-month period, the buy box win rate increased from 36% to 75%, and by the end of year 1, the average buy box win rate was 80%.

With deep research across the hair and beauty category, we were able to implement a virtuous cycle of increased revenue for Bleach London thanks to leading with a multipack strategy that, in turn, led to improved margins enabling the switch to FBA, resulting in increased conversion rate and increased revenue.