
Groove Life, a premium outdoor lifestyle brand, began in 2015 when Alaskan adventure guide Peter Goodwin sought to revolutionize silicone wedding rings. Frustrated by dangerous metal rings and uncomfortable rubber ones, he crafted the Groove Ring—durable, comfortable, and perfect for active lives. Launching on Kickstarter that December, it skyrocketed to success, igniting a journey from a frigid Alaskan garage to new headquarters in Tennessee. Growing from 6 to nearly 200 employees since 2018, Groove Life has expanded their product line and now offers innovative bands, belts, watchbands, and wallets. More than just a product maker, Groove Life inspires adventurers and dreamers alike—whether you’re scaling El Capitan or shuttling kids to soccer practice, they’ve got your back.
As Groove was getting started, Peter connected with us here at Metacake. Our specialty is using deep ecommerce business experience coupled with top-notch expertise in website design, paid traffic, and email marketing to drive real, healthy growth for ecommerce-first brands. Our specialized team employs years of ecommerce experience to drive healthy business growth in key areas. These include business growth strategy, email marketing, paid marketing, and website migrations, and optimizations.
Metacake’s passion is for helping grow brands that matter, believing that customer-focused brands with authentic missions help build a better world. Groove’s mission and values were strongly aligned with our own and we saw massive potential for the brand. As a result, we were eager to come alongside Peter to help drive strategic growth for the company by unlocking several areas of opportunity.
The Recipe for Hyper Ecommerce Growth
If you look at Groove’s path to success, you’ll find there has not been any singular home run. Anyone seasoned in direct-to-consumer ecommerce businesses knows success requires a multi-faceted approach.
For Groove, we provided strategic and technical assistance in the following areas:
Let’s dive into how each played an important role in scaling Groove Life from brand new to over 8 figures in revenue in just 3 years.
Site Design and Development
We worked with Groove to design and build a site on Shopify that reflected and communicated the purpose of their brand. This design strategy was far deeper than being aesthetically pleasing for the outdoor adventurer. Our primary focus was to create a seamless customer journey from homepage to checkout, with intuitive navigation to route customers where they need to go.
The work was not over once the site launched. From there, we provided guidance on an intentional content strategy to boost SEO as well as ongoing optimization efforts on critical pages to increase the conversion rate.
Paid Marketing
Paid marketing has also played a major role in acquiring new Groove customers. We worked closely with Groove’s team to scale Facebook, Instagram, and Google campaigns to competitive heights.
With paid advertising, we used a funnel approach that guides site visitors from the initial ad all the way through the first sale (and beyond):
Email Marketing
When done well and equipped by an email platform truly built for ecommerce, email marketing can have some of the largest impact for online revenue. And for Groove Life, a strong email program powered by Klaviyo became a home run.
Our secret sauce to sustainable, healthy ecommerce growth is growing a raving customer fan base. This takes more than simply sending emails that push sales and promotions. It requires building valuable relationships with site visitors and customers at scale.
Klaviyo is the perfect email service provider to accomplish this. We’ll provide a quick synopsis of our recipe for email success below, but you can dive into the entire gameplan in-depth right here.
Ultimately an intentional email marketing strategy unlocked massive opportunity for Groove Life, which now manages over 1 million email contacts through Klaviyo. In Groove’s lifetime, over $8.5M in revenue can be directly attributed to email marketing in Klaviyo, with 58% related to automated flows and 42% from campaigns. This revenue is even greater when you take indirect attribution into account.
Snapshot of Groove’s List Growth below.
To close…
One of the most important aspects of Groove’s business growth is its highly engaged audience. This engagement is evident across the board, from comments on Facebook ads to rave reviews on their site.
It’s important to note that this interactive customer base did not appear on their own. It took an intentional, multi-channel strategy that combined a great site experience, engaging paid marketing, and relevant email communication to build raving fans.
The result? A brand new business grew from 0 to over 8 figures in just three years.
For more than 20 years, we’ve helped build hundreds of eCommerce ventures and generated billions in revenue. Our Tennessee heritage brings a down-to-earth, yet innovative perspective to every project. If you’re committed to growing a thriving business and think we could be the right fit, let’s connect.
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