Best Direct to Consumer Campaign or Strategy – Tomahawk Shades and Today’s Business

Innovation and Creativity

Securing placements with quality content partners can be very challenging but incredibly rewarding. In order to help secure placements into quality articles, we had to first understand how to best connect with the decision makers and figure out what would resonate with them. 

In order to accomplish this, we contracted some of the top freelance writers in the fashion industry and conducted interviews with them. We asked them to show us both good and bad examples of pitches, what styles to pitch, and how to build relationships with writers without being too pestering.

We used these insights to come up with unique pitching techniques. For example, we discovered that although email is often a preferred channel, writers and editors get overwhelmed with emails in their inbox and these emails often get overlooked. Instead, we created short and sweet 30 to 45-second videos wearing the sunglasses and discussing key features, and then sent these out to editors via Instagram direct messages. This helped us build key relationships with editors such as Andrew Amelinckx at Insider, who featured us in this best polarized sunglasses article and created great results for us.

We also conducted discovery calls with publishers and asked them about their challenges and what was important to them. We looked for ways in which we could provide value to them outside of connecting them with brands.

Publishers like Style Girlfriend were looking for notable figures to help them create unique and appealing content for their audience. We tapped into our influencer network and helped secure Tomahawk influencer John Shackleton to collaborate in Style Girlfriend’s Real Guys, Real Style series where he featured Tomahawk products.

Additionally, we targeted competitor reviews and worked with publishers to offer higher commission rates than what the competition was offering. This encouraged the publisher to recommend us over competitors to users who were looking to make a purchase. An example of this can be found in Clothed Up’s Shady Rays review.

Human Touch

Human relationships and labor were the backbone of this campaign. Sure, we used SEMrush to pull relevant non-branded keywords into Google Sheets and eventually turned these sheets into a proprietary database/CRM, but this process took hours and was truly a team effort. Our Affiliate Operations Manager helped determine the process/procedures and created training videos/documentation so that these tasks could be performed effectively and consistently by our team of winter and spring interns. The compiled information was then passed along to our affiliate strategists, who used their knowledge of pitching to create relationships with writers and editors. The team at Tomahawk Shades was always incredibly prompt with sending out product samples to editors so editors could feel the quality of the products firsthand. The CEO of Tomahawk Shades would also make himself readily available anytime an editor wanted to hop on a call. Technology was certainly vital to the campaign, but without a human touch, the technology would be totally useless.

Smart Execution

The strategy execution was mentioned above. As the Manager of Growth & Partnerships, I developed the strategy based on my years of experience in the industry in multiple roles. I knew exactly what we needed to do, what tools needed to be used, and what team members would be required to ensure this was carried out effectively. Without a skilled operations manager, fantastic recruiting from our HR team, quality interns, our affiliate strategists, and great collaboration with our client and partners, none of this would have been possible.

There were certainly many challenges in achieving success here. Getting so many team members to collaborate effectively is always a challenge, especially when we are all working remotely. Training interns to understand the industry, processes, and tools within a very short period of time is quite challenging. Pitching a brand that is unrecognized in the industry and getting major media publications to consider featuring a start-up is also difficult, but we worked as a team to overcome these challenges. 

We used CloudApp to create quick and easy to follow training videos. Our 15-minute daily scrums ensured that each morning, our team discussed any questions that may have come up and communicated their priority tasks for each day. We identified ways in which we could differentiate the brand as well as our pitches so that we could get in front of the right people at the right time. Finally, we sent out countless product samples so that partners could understand how fantastic the products we were promoting truly were.