Furnishing a Greener World
Vermont Woods Studios is a mission-driven retailer of high quality furniture and home decor.
Vermont Woods Studios was founded by Peggy and Ken Farabaugh in 2005. They merged Peggy’s passion for forest conservation with Ken’s interest in woodworking. What emerged was an online furniture company born to promote Vermont craftsmanship and environmental sustainability. The company sells quality American made furniture and home décor.
The engagement between Monte Verde Media and Vermont Woods Studios began in mid-2016 and lasted nearly 10 years. Over that period, Monte Verde became a deeply embedded growth partner across SEO, paid media, content, video, CRO, ecommerce strategy, and analytics.
What began as an SEO recovery project eventually expanded into a full-funnel growth partnership that helped VWS scale revenue, diversify customer acquisition, modernize its ecommerce infrastructure, and prepare for a successful acquisition.
Vermont Woods Studios was built on a foundation of SEO. From its' inception in 2005 until 2015, 90% of customers were acquired from organic search, and the company spent less than 5% of sales on advertising.
However, the business started to struggle around 2013 following Google's RankBrain and Hummingbird algorithm updates and experienced a few consecutive years of declining traffic and sales. VWS first retained Monte Verde in mid-2016 to support with SEO efforts.
By early 2017, organic rankings and visibility were at all time highs. And after 3 consecutive years of negative sales growth, 2017 was an all time record year, powered by increased organic search traffic and high rankings for commercial intent target keywords.
Over the next several years we focused on SEO-optimized content, new landing page creation, technical SEO, UX improvements, and many other aspects of optimizing the website for better SEO and conversion rates.
Although organic traffic is no longer responsible for 90% of customer acquisition, SEO continues to be an important piece of the marketing strategy even after a decade of consistent effort, optimization, and growth.
After restarting revenue growth with an increase in organic traffic in 2017, we started thinking about how to diversify our customer acquisition beyond organic search. Organic acquisition can be cost effective, but sometimes volatile and unpredictable due to algorithm updates. We knew that to grow the business sustainably we needed an acquisition channel that was consistent and scalable.
Paid search ads were the logical next step.
From 2017 to 2021, we increased our annual paid ad budget from ~$70k to $1m+. That's a 15x increase over 4 years, and 2021 was the most profitable year ever for VWS.
Along the path from $70k in annual spend to $1m+ ad budget, diversifying our traffic sources and reducing our reliance on Google became a priority.
In terms of scalability and efficiency, Facebook & Instagram ads seemed like the best place to invest in developing a new source of customer acquisition.
We started small on Facebook Ads in 2019, but by 2021 we were firmly in the walking stage of our crawl, walk, run progression. Within a year or two of starting our ad program on Meta, it was clear that Facebook & Instagram Ads were viable and scalable and destined to become a bigger part of the business.
As Meta Ads grew as an acquisition channel, our audience size increased, and short-form mobile video started to emerge as a major social media trend, figuring out how to leverage video to tell the brand story and turn our audience into customers was critical.
We created dozens of unique assets catered to different platforms, placements, audience personas, selling points, and stages of the customer journey.
These assets helped VWS communicate the quality of its furniture, the values behind the brand, the beauty of Vermont craftsmanship, and the environmental mission that made the company unique.
Read more about how video marketing helped VWS increase audience engagement, improve ad efficiency, and turn more prospects into customers.
As the business scaled, the website needed to support faster iteration, better merchandising, cleaner analytics, improved tracking, and a more modern ecommerce experience.
We wrote the RFP, vetted potential development partners, gave input on design and content decisions, and worked closely with the chosen development agency throughout the project, including post-launch optimization.
Migrating to Shopify was not just a platform change. It was a strategic move designed to increase the speed of innovation, simplify development, improve internal workflows, and make it easier to test and launch new initiatives.
As Vermont Woods Studios prepared for a potential sale, Monte Verde Media supported the business through the preparation, acquisition, and transition process.
We helped build the first pitch deck, fielded questions from potential buyers, and provided context around the company’s marketing channels, analytics, ecommerce infrastructure, customer acquisition strategy, historical performance, and growth opportunities.
Because we had been deeply involved in the business for nearly a decade, we were able to help maintain continuity throughout the sale process and support a smooth transition to new ownership.
After the acquisition, Monte Verde continued working with the new owner for 18 months, helping preserve the momentum that had been built, transfer institutional knowledge, and identify the highest-priority opportunities for the next stage of growth.
This case study would not have been possible without the support of many talented agency partners and collaborators over the years, including Measurement Has Company, ContentWorksVT, BootstrapVT, Uncap, Solidarity of Unbridled Labour, Olive & Milo, and Pinemark Studios.
Scaling Vermont Woods Studios was a true team effort, and we’re grateful for the partners who contributed their time, focus, and expertise.
