AlpinerX case study

All Rights Reserved. Sylvain Montreuil - Pre-Commerce Case Study
REVIVING AN HERITAGE
WATCH BRAND

THE CHALLENGE
Peter Stas, founder of Frederic Constant contacted me to help him revive Alpina watches brand.
Alpina is an heritage brand Alpina Watches that has been making high quality Swiss watches since
1883. Inventor of the ultimate alpine watch (Alpiner 4) in 1938, Alpina has always been the
reference for any outdoors enthusiast. Combining practicality and beauty has always been the core
of Alpina’s expertise.
Yet the brand was loosing speed and needed to reinvent itself for the digital era. Alpina had the
target to rival with Tissot that was successfully introduced the T-touch, a connected watch with
technological advancement while conserving Swiss watch making tradition. While Swiss connected
watches were a fast growing market, distributers were reluctant to acquire Alpina’s new creation as
they were concerned about the market demand and sales potential for such a “forgotten” brand.
The strategy was then to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign that would demonstrate
strong market demand while generating massive press coverage for the brand. That’s how we got
started to work on repositioning the brand and getting ready for a successful crowdfunding
campaign. The rest his history.

KEY PRINCIPLES
GROW DIRECT-TO-CUSTOMER
GENERATE REVENUE BEFORE PRODUCTION
GRAB COMMUNITY ATTENTION
GAUGE REAL MARKET DEMAND
GATHER EARLY ADOPTER DATA
1
2
3
4
5

1
ACQUIRE
BLOCKS
LANDING 
PAGE
SOCIAL
ADVERTISING

GATHER EARLY ADOPTER DATA
Gather an audience before
you do anything else
“
MINIMUM VIABLE
AUDIENCE
“
TAERGET
AUDIENCE
FACEBOOK 
ADS
LANDING
PAGE

We set up a landing page in order to start building a list of early adopters
interested in this new watch from Alpina. The great this was that the Brand
already had a community of few hundred thousand followers. Data informs us
on how to reﬁne the target audience on our ads, improve the marketing
material and optimize funnel. After many iterations, we were able to improve
the conversation rate from an initial 2% to 21% and acquired a list of 25K
prospects positioned to acquire the watch at a 50% discount.
LANDING 
PAGE
MESSAGE
KEY VISUAL
CALL-TO-ACTION
1
2
3
OPTIMIZING THE LANDING PAGE

In order to reach more people we use Facebook ads to send qualiﬁed
traﬁc to the Landing Page. We ran many iteration of the ads in order to
optimise the Cost per Lead. We started with a very high CPL of $10 and
manage to lower it down to $1.5 while conserving very high quality
leads.
SOCIAL
ADVERTISING
OPTIMIZING THE ADS
MINIMUM VIABLE
AUDIENCE
CUSTOM AUDIENCE
LOOK ALIKE AUDIENCE
KEY VISUAL
AUDIENCE
1
2
3
MESSAGE

2
DESIGN
BLOCKS
STORYTELLING
VIDEO
v i d e o
PHOTO
SHOOT

STORYBOARD
CROWDFUNDING VIDEO

MAIN STORYTELLING
VIDEO
10 SECOND TEASER
EXPLODED VIEW

KEY VISUALS TECH SPECS

3
AMPLIFY
BLOCKS
EMAIL
MARKETING
SOCIAL
CONTENT
SOCIAL PR
& INFLUENCERS
PR KIT

Email marketing is the corner stone of a crowdfunding campaign. We
used our proven and tested email sequence strategy with our template
emails to draft an eﬃcient launch campaign for AlpinerX.
The main objective is to educate the audience about the brand and the
new product while measuring community receptiveness. When we got
closer to the launch date, we start making announcement about the
Kickstarter campaign and get them ready to buy as quick as possible.
The objective here, was to leverage the community to reach the $50,000
goal in a few minutes which would send a strong signal of success to the
press and distributors.
EMAIL
MARKETING
EMAIL SEQUENCE STRATEGY
TEMPLATE EMAILS
EDUCATING THE AUDIENCE

WELCOME EMAIL EDUCATIONAL SEQUENCE
CAMPAIGN
ANNOUNCEMENT
END OF CAMPAIGN
& FOLLOW UP
25
EMAILS DURING THE
CAMPAIGN

With a community of 25K highly targeted individuals and very engaged
community, we were ready to launch.
All the Key Performance Indicators were great - Cost Per Lead,
Conversion rate on Landing Page, Email Open Rate, Email engagement
consistency, Social Media engagement,…
KPI
63,1% OPEN RATE
39% CLICK RATE
ALPINERX KPI
READY TO LAUNCH
25K
ENGAGED COMMUNITY

SOCIAL PR
& INFLUENCERS
PR KIT
The Brand was already known in the watch industry and exhibiting
each year at Basel World, the world's leading event for this
industry attracts the main brands, buyers and media
representatives to Basel year after year.
It was strategic to announce the Kickstarter launch at the event. It
enable to reach all the major press outlet from the industry.
When the campaign successfully launch and reach its goal within
the ﬁrst hour it rapidly snowball to other blogs.
The fact that the Brand was already established guaranteed that
the product was going to be delivered on time which is one of the
major pitfalls of Kickstarter projects.
The great support form the press enable the campaign to reach
over $300,000 in the ﬁrst day.
PRESS RELEASE KEY VISUALS
PRESS KIT
GETTING SUPPORT FROM THE PRESS

4
FUND
BLOCK
K
80%
E-COMMERCE
& SALES PAGE
REWARD
STRATEGY

K
80%
E-COMMERCE
& SALES PAGE
CROWDFUNGING PAGE
STRUCTURE
CREATING AN OFFER THEY CAN’T REFUSE
REWARD
STRATEGY
Our overall goal was to demonstrate strong market demand in order to
convince distributors to carry the brand after the Kickstarter campaign. We
were aiming at doing over $1M in the campaign. In order to achieve this we
had to present a very robust campaign page that will relieve all the
objections of the potential buyers.
We used the Anatomy of Crowdfunding page that I have been refining over
the years. This enable us to have an amazing guideline to structure the
information in a way that would answer all the buyers questions and create
an offer they can’t refuse.
The reward strategy is also a very important part of the Crowdfunding sales
page. It combines a pricing strategy with urgency mechanism. We wanted
to make sure that our email audience would get early access to the Early
Birds at 50% of and that would rapidly exceed the announced campaign
goal of $50,000. That is important for many reason. Over the years of
launching crowdfunding projects, I realise that demonstrating success early
is a great generator of more success. Then once you have sold to your
audience, then you have to get the press engaged to drive fresh traffic to
the sales page. Once all this triggers are exhausted, then you buy traffic
with social ads.
That is exactly what we did!

MULTI LANGUAGE
CROWDFUNDING SALES
PAGES
REWARDS
THE SALES PAGE

THE BLOCKS WE USED FOR THIS CAMPAIGN
Our Pre-commerce strategy is a modular approach build around
our Blocks. A successful Campaign requires that you build and
manage each Block. This is what we do and we have the people to
deliver.
To revive the Alpina Brand, we have implement and managed 10
of our 12 blocks.
Each Block is oriented around a Sprint. We make sure we stay
focused on getting things done and don’t drown ourself on all the
tasks required to launch a successful campaign. After each sprint
we review your Block, analyse Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
and iterate until the desired threshold Block performance is
reached.
We take an agile and iterative approach to Creative and Media
production. We use multi-variable testing on each Block to ﬁnd
the best performing creative. Our goal is to engage your audience
and move them eﬃciently through the funnel.
STORYTELLING
VIDEO
v i d e o
LANDING 
PAGE
SOCIAL PR
& INFLUENCERS
SOCIAL
CONTENT
EMAIL
MARKETING
PR KIT
SOCIAL
ADVERTISING
PHOTO
SHOOT
K
80%
E-COMMERCE
& SALES PAGE
Hi !
Hi !
BRAND
STORY
REWARD
STRATEGY

CHF 1,569,882
3139% OF GOAL
2795 BACKERS
30 DAYS
$562 AVG. BASKET
$50 000 GOAL

OVERALL ROI
AD SPEND
ROAS
PRE-COMMERCE SCORE
CAMPAIGN INVESTMENT
$1,578,124
$136,000
710,87%
$86,000
951,8%
$818,548
$9M in sales in the following year
RESULT:
THE ROI OF THE CAMPAIGN
ADS REVENUS

RESULTS
Once again we demonstrated the power of the crowd. The crowdfunding
campaign was a success and enable the brand to become competitive
again. Alpina Kickstarter campaign made the brand visible again to
distributors that were now calling in to know how they could carry the
brand. The success totally inverted the sales relationships with
distributors and enable Alpina to deploy all its distribution capacities
worldwide.
Alpina went from a small €2M to €10M in sales in a year by
demonstrating market traction to its distributors.
We proved that Kickstarter and pre-commerce can be used not only to
launch startup project but also to accelerate the growth of already
established brands.
This Digital strategy also enable the brand to strengthen its online sales
via is E-commerce store. The brand now use this Pre-commerce strategy
to launch its new models.
REVIVING AN HERITAGE WATCH BRAND

5
BUILD

MARKETING
EFFICIENCY
MARGIN
EFFICIENCY
PRODUCT
EFFICIENCY
Cut the middlemen and
leverage direct-to-customer
digital commerce to
fundamentally transform
business mechanics.
MANUFACTURING
EFFICIENCY
Present MVPs and get
direct feedback from
potential customers to
eliminate guesswork and
foster innovation.
Focus on Brand
storytelling and direct
conversation with users
to own the customer
relationship.
Evaluate demand and
generate revenue before
production to radically
reduce wastage with a
build-to-order system.
KEY BENEFITS: EFFICIENCY

6
GROW
DIRECT-TO-CUSTOMER

WANT TO LAUNCH
YOUR BRAND WITH
PRE-COMMERCE?

WE’RE READY
LET’S DO THIS
Sylvain MONTREUIL
CEO
www.sylvainmontreuil.com
hello@sylvainmontreuil.com

AlpinerX case study

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to AlpinerX case study

Similar to AlpinerX case study (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

AlpinerX case study