Vehla

Brand Story

Launched in May 2019, VEHLA is the newest brand of luxe, high-quality eyewear designed for women.

The Australian brand was founded by Georgia Williams. It was born out of her love for accessorising with pieces that make you stand out. She wanted to design and curate a line of eyewear and also establish a global lifestyle brand that inspires you to elevate your everyday style with a simple accessory like that ‘go-to’ pair of sunglasses.

The Objective

Although VEHLA experienced ongoing growth using influencer marketing but, finding effective ways to run performance-driven ads on Facebook and Instagram was a challenge that Vehla was looking to overcome. The initial goal was set to running ads profitably with a 4X ROAS target along with month to month growth in terms of revenue driven directly from ads. 

Challenges

Although Eyewear brands are in every major shopping center on earth, selling them online is not easy. Not only VEHLA is an eyewear brand, but it is also a luxury brand that sells extremely high-quality premium sunglasses. In terms of marketing, it means focusing on highly segmented audience groups on social media platforms that are extremely competitive; the cherry of the cake, the ones every advertiser is after. For the paid ads to work, we knew a hyper-focused strategy is needed to promote the brand to build interest and intent, yet to be as efficient and precise as possible to ensure we can produce the results & meet Vehla’s marketing goals. 

The Strategy

Understanding that selling premium sunglasses online on social media was not something that could be easily done, we knew that a holistic marketing strategy would be needed. Users are not searching for sunglasses on Facebook. Still, users might be interested in purchasing a pair if we market it right. Instead of focusing on standard campaigns that promote the product and include a direct promotion (like any other eyewear brands), we didn’t want to directly promote the product. We wanted users to click through to the website out of curiosity and the inner need to discover. 

Most competitors were running standard carousel ads with boring product images that urge users to view a collection or shop a product, we knew that wouldn’t be effective. Instead, we evaluated the entire funnel, scanned through all of Vehla’s online presence and developed a strategy that is built around their strongest assets; their creatives and Instagram profile. We quickly realized the potential of using their favourite influencer’s content as the front of the ad creatives and built a strategy to incorporate those assets. 

Instead of standard ads, we used Instagram photos and focused on creating a high-frequency ad delivery to transform interest into direct intent of our audiences. We used common principles of marketing to gain brand similarity and association. We used a sequential order of ads for each audience group while filtering through low-performing ads to ensure the highest level of efficiency per impression, which means finding that sweet spot of serving just the right amount of ad impressions per user to generate a conversion. The perfect balance between ad delivery and revenue generated. 

VEHLA realized the importance of social proof in customer behaviour and we reinforced that by targeting heavily close circles of friends within our audience groups. The logic was simple; you’re more likely to show interest in a product if your friends are already customers. This logic was proven to be extremely effective when we realized that certain audience segmentations that included geographical proximity and similar groups performed better than others.

Within the first month of applying the strategies above, Vehla experienced unprecedented growth. Not only did we exceed the expectations in terms of ROAS generated, but we also surpassed the overall growth. Over the next few months, we plan to incorporate new-age strategies to fully tap on the market to further accelerate the brand’s growth by branching out to new platforms and building the largest Australian eyewear brand on social media.