%20(1).png){kind=logo}
Case study
Wicked Cushions
Over het merk
Wicked Cushions
In 2016, Wicked Cushions was founded by my cousin. He had emigrated from Israel to the U.S. and was working in restaurants. At 25, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do until one night, while awake late, he saw a Facebook ad for an Amazon Business Course. He enrolled in the course, and after completing it, began searching for a product to sell. For nearly a year, he kept looking—until one day, he needed to replace the cushions on his headphones.
He trained while wearing his Beats Studio headphones, and the cushions had worn out. He checked Amazon to see if replacements were available. There were a few options, but they were cheap and appeared to be low-quality direct imports. Seeing the lack of better alternatives, he wondered if he could create something of higher quality—and so, at the end of 2016, Wicked Cushions was born.
He began designing a few versions of headphone cushions, initially focused on the Beats Studio line, and sold them on Amazon through the end of 2017. In 2017, he launched his own website, secured a trademark for the brand, and began building the business.
That’s how it all started. In mid-2019, I joined him, and today, we have a small remote team of six full-time freelancers. We sell our products on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and our own website. Our product line includes a wide range of cushions for many different types of headphones. For nearly every popular headphone, we offer a compatible cushion. We’re constantly releasing new products and expanding into other headphone accessories—lately, focusing more on gaming-related products.
Right now, we sell around 75 different cushion models, many of which feature custom designs. That’s what makes our brand unique—while there are plenty of cushion providers, we create unique designs. We vary materials, colors, and patterns so customers can find cushion styles on our site that aren’t available anywhere else.
While we can create custom designs upon request, it’s not something we typically do, since it’s not cost-efficient to make a one-off product. However, if we notice enough requests for a specific style, we’ll often add it to our product line.
Our biggest market is the U.S., but we sell internationally. There are only a few countries we don’t serve due to shipping constraints, but generally, we ship to anyone willing to pay for delivery. Our key markets include the U.S., Australia, Canada, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, and Mexico—so we’re quite global.
De Uitdaging
When I joined Wicked Cushions, our goal was to take the company to the next level. At that time, my cousin had just one colleague, and there was simply too much work for such a small team. Our focus was on rebuilding the website, onboarding and starting to sell on Amazon and other marketplaces, expanding our global sales, and creating a solid structure for our operations. We were checking items off our list and eventually reached the point where it made sense to outsource key email functions to a professional company.
Specifically, we were looking at improving the core flows like the new subscriber flow, browse abandonment flow, and cart abandonment flow. We had built those ourselves and would revisit them every six months or so to tweak things a bit. But we realized that none of us were copywriters or email professionals, and we felt the time was right—around four or five months ago—to bring in a partner to help.
We also didn’t want to remain constantly responsible for checking whether the flows were working properly or could be improved. Combined with the fact that this isn’t our area of expertise, and not knowing if we were getting the most out of our flows, outsourcing gave us peace of mind.
The majority of our revenue doesn’t come from email campaigns, mainly because our product line doesn’t lend itself well to content-based marketing—there just isn’t much content to create around our products. That’s why we wanted to ensure that the flows people do sign up for were as clear, effective, and visually appealing as possible. That’s how we eventually found Polaris Growth.
We started working together about five months ago. At the time, we were using Omnisend, and our main goal was to migrate everything to Klaviyo. We were experiencing some limitations with Omnisend and felt we couldn’t do enough customization. It was easy to use, but it lacked functionality. We didn’t really know how to properly handle the migration or how to interpret the data from our existing list.
With the help of Bogdan initially, as a freelancer, and later Polaris Growth, we gained a much better understanding of which parts of our list were valuable and which weren’t. Interestingly, a large part of the list turned out to be very valuable, something we only realized during that process. We always knew the list was good, but we didn’t realize how many people were actually engaged.
We also wanted to have all of our flows rebuilt from scratch, which Bogdan and the rest of the Polaris Growth team did over the course of a few months—up until two months ago.
Initially, we didn’t intend to work with Polaris Growth long-term, as we prefer project-based collaborations. Currently, I’m in discussions with Omar about a possible ongoing partnership, but right now we don’t have a monthly agreement. The reason is that content doesn’t really work for our product type, so a continuous stream of content-based emails isn’t necessary. That said, we do plan to keep working with Polaris Growth, and we’ll be building new flows in the near future.
Resultaten volgens onze klant
The results in terms of revenue generated from the collaboration are difficult to pinpoint, as we stopped focusing on certain things and shifted our attention to specific areas within Klaviyo. The results do seem positive, but it’s hard to say exactly what is driving them. What we have clearly seen is that the increase in traffic has also led to a noticeable rise in interaction with the flows—especially the number of people signing up, which has improved significantly.
The design and content of the emails are also much better than what we had in the past. We wrapped up the collaboration two months ago, so it’s still a bit early to fully measure long-term impact, but I’m quite confident that the partnership delivered a lot of value. Our intention is to work with Polaris Growth again on major campaigns and new flows—flows we didn’t even know we needed but were recommended to us by Bogdan and the Polaris Growth team. We’ll be discussing and implementing those in the near future.
My business partner and I were genuinely very happy with the results. A huge weight has been lifted off our shoulders—everything is running smoothly without us needing to worry about it, and it all seems to be working very well. We can check in with Omar or someone else from the team to evaluate things, make decisions, and implement improvements, and that setup works really well for us.
CONTACT
Contact Polaris Growth
Controleer je bericht en probeer het opnieuw
.svg){kind=small}
