Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
In series two, episode 11, we caught up with Piglet in Bed, a luxury bedding, sleepwear and homeware brand founded in 2017. Piglet began selling beautiful linen duvet covers and has since grown its range to include sleepwear, table linens, curtains, homeware and more. The Brightpearl-powered business recently established a secondary base of operation in Illinois to help keep pace with growing demand for its products stateside.
During the podcast, the brand’s CFP Axel Stelk shared how the Brightpearl-powered brand achieved 67% YOY revenue increase in 2020/21 to win 24th place on the Brightpearl Lightning 50 UK and be named one of the top three homeware brands in the UK. He also revealed how 70% of the business’s website traffic is now organic and which tech tools they use to drive growth.
Here are some of the highlights from the transcript…
- “We rely heavily on e-commerce – about 80% of our sales are coming through our two websites in the UK and the US, but since the beginning of this year, we’ve branched out quite heavily into B2B. We’ve started selling through Nordstrom in the US and John Lewis in the UK, both of which have been very, very successful and very quickly shifted our revenue mix.”
- “We didn’t have a background in SEO so we avoided it for the first few years. Then we hired an SEO expert and our organic search volumes have gone through the roof – it really has shown us just how much opportunity there is.
- “We want to be a brand where organic is the main drive of growth, where customers recommend our products to their friends and family because they’re good products and they had great service. At the end of last year, we changed our customer acquisition strategy. It meant the first six months of this year were incredibly stressful but we’ve managed to achieve 60 to 70% organic traffic to our website, which was probably the inverse last year, so we’ve seen a big change very quickly.”
- “Like most modern brands, we’re using a whole myriad of different platforms. I’d say Shopify is definitely at the center of it all for us – it gives us the flexibility to plug in different solutions and upgrade solutions very easily when the time has come. We used to use Klaviyo for CRM but we realized as part of our shift into more organic channels that we needed to upgrade to Ometria for more flexibility and functionality.”
- “To be ranked 24 in Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 is amazing. We’ve done so much work and having these milestones really validates that our hard work is paying off. It’s not just hard work for the sake of it, but it’s actually taking us places and probably at a faster rate than other companies, which is very exciting.”
Want to hear more of what Axel had to say? Catch up with the full episode, and subscribe to upcoming ones, here.