R—K Atelier
Selling a €2,400 bag to people who had never heard of the house
A 90-year-old Parisian maison with a wholesale-dependent business and no direct customer relationship. Built the positioning, the acquisition engine and the retention layer that took direct-to-consumer from a rounding error to a third of revenue.
- Sector
- Leather goods maison
- Duration
- 14 months
- Disciplines
- Brand Strategy · Performance Media · Lifecycle & CRM
Results
- of revenue from DTC
- 31%From 4% at engagement start
- Direct revenue
- +186%Year over year
- Blended ROAS
- 2.9xIncrementality-adjusted
- Repeat purchase rate
- 41%Within 18 months
DTC passed the two-year target eleven months early and, more consequentially, changed the wholesale conversation — the house renegotiated three partner agreements from a position it had not held in a decade. The atelier content series is still the highest-performing creative on the account.
01 — The challenge
R—K sold beautifully and knew almost nothing about who was buying. Eighty-four percent of revenue came through wholesale partners who owned the customer data, the pricing narrative and the merchandising. The house had opened a direct channel two years earlier and it had stalled at four percent of revenue — the site read as a catalogue, paid media was bidding on the brand name it already owned, and there was no email programme beyond a receipt. The board wanted DTC at twenty percent within two years. The real problem underneath was that nobody could articulate why a customer should buy from the maison rather than from the department store that discounted it.
02 — The strategy
Reposition around provenance, not product
The wholesale channel could match R—K on product photography and beat it on convenience. What it could not reproduce was the atelier — the eleven craftspeople, the two-week construction, the repair service that had been running since 1961. We moved the entire brand argument from the object to its making, which relocated the competition somewhere the department store could not follow.
Spend against consideration, not conversion
Paid media was almost entirely bottom-funnel, harvesting demand that wholesale had created and calling it performance. We rebuilt the budget around a 55/30/15 split into consideration, retargeting and brand search, and held it there for two quarters against considerable internal pressure while the leading indicators moved before revenue did.
Make the first purchase the beginning of something
At this price point a second purchase is worth more than three new customers. We designed the post-purchase experience as the actual product — registration, care guidance, the repair promise made concrete — so that owning an R—K piece came with a relationship rather than a receipt.
03 — What was built
- Repositioning and message architecture, tested with 32 customer interviews across three markets
- Atelier content series — 40 assets shot over six days, cut for paid social, site and CRM
- Full paid rebuild across Meta, Google, Pinterest and YouTube with a standing creative testing cadence
- Server-side tracking and a geo holdout design to measure incrementality rather than attributed clicks
- Fourteen-flow lifecycle programme in Klaviyo, segmented by product category and purchase recency
- Repair and registration programme launched as a CRM entry point, not a service page
“We had been told for years that our problem was awareness. Anna established in about six weeks that our problem was that we had never actually said anything. The commercial result followed from fixing that.”