Case Study: Secondhandbags AG
400% year-to-year growth
In December 2020, R17 joined Secondhandbags AG as a shareholder and as a performance marketing and technology partner. Since then we've helped take the business international, launching a rental-service and substantially increased sales.
The results
400%+
5+
1m+
Management Summary
Together with Emanuel Müller we acquired the company Secondhandbags AG in 2020. Since then we were able to transform the business substantially.
Technology: We've migrated the store from WooCommerce to Shopify. Also, because Secondhandbags is a "special" type of e-com business, owing to every product being unique and only being able to be sold once, it required a new approach on how to (mass-)create products and launch them. Our team developed an advanced product creation tool that allowed us to increase the amount of products we have in the store x5.
Business Development: We've helped take the company beyond Swiss borders with an international store: Secondhandbags.com. We've also launched a luxury handbag rental service with the store: Secondhandbags.rent. In addition, we launched a Live-WhatsApp-Chat in conjunction with the software company Charles. Furthermore, we raised growth capital and found investors.
Performance Marketing: When we acquired Secondhandbags AG, there were no paid ads running and the company had no pixels or analytics setup. Our Performance Marketing team managed to ramp up multiple profitable advertising channels, namely Google Ads, Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram), Pinterest Ads and Snapchat Ads. The biggest challenges faced were that very product on the online store is unique and once sold, no longer can be marketed, making the creative production process more complex. Secondly, due to the high AOVs we had massive "double attribution issues", meaning that a sale gets attributed to branded search from Google and, for example, Snapchat, as well as Instagram re-targeting. We solved this by driving multiple attribution models, comparing them and finding a good "middle ground".
"In partnership with R17 Ventures we founded the joint venture company, Secondhandbags AG. The team at R17 took over performance marketing, content creation and Shopify development. Within one year, we were able to increase sales by 400% year-on-year. We really appreciate how entrepreneurial R17 is."
