Hiatt Hardware: a DTC channel built from nothing to £85,000 a month
An established trade business with no direct-to-consumer channel. This was not an account to optimise. It was a channel to build.
The challenge
Hiatt Hardware sold through established trade and retail routes. Direct to consumer did not exist: a website with fundamental problems, no paid or organic presence, no email programme, no loyalty.
The obvious answer was that there was no traffic. The real answer was product data. Customers searched for specifications, compatibility and dimensions. The site gave them names and prices.
I found the detail by sitting with the customer service team and going through the questions they answered most often. Every one was a specification a customer could not find, so they picked up the phone instead.
What I did
- Rebuilt the website on Magento, then rebuilt it again as we learned what the category needed.
- Launched paid media across Google Search, Shopping, Remarketing, Bing and Facebook, structured around how people buy hardware rather than how the platforms suggest organising an account.
- Ran SEO alongside, so the channel was not wholly dependent on paid.
- Built product content from the customer service questions. It improved conversion rate and cut repetitive enquiries to the sales team.
- Launched Amazon and eBay as further direct-to-consumer routes, with the two directors.
- Built belief internally. A new channel inside a trade business needs people to back it before it has numbers to show.
How it was measured
- I did not measure this on platform-reported revenue. Finance supplied end-of-month financials: actual revenue and profitability by product area. Budget moved toward what was genuinely profitable, not what reported well.
- It was a completely new channel reaching new customers. Nothing came at the expense of the trade business.
The result
Direct-to-consumer revenue reached £85,000 a month, from nothing, within 18 months.
Within that, paid traffic sales grew from £7,700 in January 2020 to £62,000 in November 2020, with return on ad spend holding at 437% throughout. Growth that keeps its efficiency is a different achievement from growth that buys itself.
Once the targets were met, Hiatt built an internal team around the channel and I transitioned the website across to them. That was always the goal: something the business owned, not rented.