Rise and Shine is a segment dedicated to emerging eCommerce brands. Profiled companies are selected by offering an impressive product, exhibiting creative marketing strategies, and utilizing a variety of technology and tools. Profiled companies may or may not by Yaguara customers.

Name: Brooklinen‍

Website: https://www.brooklinen.com/‍

Categories: eCommerce, Lifestyle, Home and Decor‍

Year Founded: 2014‍

HQ: Brooklyn, New York‍

Founders: Vicki Fulop & Rich Fulop‍

Total Funding Amount: $10M (Series A)‍

Alexa Ranking (Global, US): 44,749, 6,334

‍The Skinny: You’re going to like the way you sleep. Basking on a budget.

2013: Co-Founders and mid-twenties couple, Vicki and Rich Fulop, were in Las Vegas for a getaway trip. While the city provided a fair amount of entertainment, it was actually the hotel’s bed sheets that impressed the duo. But when they tried to purchase their own set they were met with $800 shopping cart, far north of their price range.

So they started to think. Then research. Then build their first bed sheet sample with either having zero experience in the industry.

2014: Vicki and Rich launched a Kickstarter and quickly exceeded their sales goals, accompanied with rave reviews. This combination meant they might have captured lightning in a bottle - so they started Brooklinen.

Now: Brooklinen is one of the finer examples of how to successfully scale a direct-to-consumer business. They now have annual revenues north of $50 million, close to thirty employees, and an almost cult-like customer base ready to recommend their product. These factors were enticing enough for Brooklinen to take on their first outside funding since inception, a healthy $10 million Series A round.

Even for a bedding company, there must be no time for rest.

We broke down this growing brand:

(jump to section)

Marketing Site‍

Content Strategy‍

Social Media‍

Toolkit‍

Performance‍

The Shine‍

Précis

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Marketing Site

Brooklinen’s website has a soft welcoming aesthetic, which compliments the goods they sell. The color pallette is modern and clean. The more neutral warm accents help balance the bold call-to-actions across the site.

Their copy and product descriptions have a calm and inviting tone. You won’t find too much length or fancy wordsmithing. Examples of phrases across the site:
Thick, lush, and crazy-soft
No middlemen, no luxury mark-ups, just good sheet
Let’s be friends
The ingredients of a great night’s sleep

The initial user journey will narrow you to a few routes. You can either 1) start shopping for their products, 2) read reviews on their products, or 3) answer quizzes leading to their products.

Brooklinen’s main quiz is simple. There aren’t any personality or exotic questions, just three steps that lead to a recommended product:

Brooklinen takes pride in their output and they don’t shy away from sharing the secrets of their success. Every product has a thorough breakdown educating the consumer on their attention to detail:

Finally, the reviews. And do they have reviews:

Accumulating over 30,000 reviews is one feat, but to keep a rating average north of 4.5 stars is truly impressive. Peer reviews are the strongest form of marketing, and everyone is recommending to hop in bed with Brooklinen.

Content Strategy

Let us introduce you to Brookliving, the blog of Brooklinen. Upon arrival we received a ‘lifestyle blog’ sense, which was confirmed by its description:
“The best in interior design, style, bedding, textiles, and achievable inspiration for your space from industry experts and tastemakers.”

A collection of post titles over the past twelve months:
The Ten Best Hostess Gifts to Give This Season
What You’re Really Paying For When You Buy Expensive Sheets
These Six Plants are Scientifically Proven to Help You Sleep
How to Be the Perfect Guest

The average length of their past five feature posts was 520 words. But while the shorter posts are quickly targeted at one product or tip, the longer posts sprinkle multiple items throughout from their catalog:

All in all, Brookliving maintains a healthy balance of being informative and driving visitors towards their products. A lovely sample of their blog:

7 Ways to Fall Asleep Faster

Social Media

Brooklinen’s social media presence is, as expected, heavily catered towards their catalog. Occasionally they stray away with a quote or pop culture reference, but expect nice comfy content the rest of the time.

Toolkit

Brooklinen has become a well-oiled machine, so there are several moving parts as they keep growing. We dug into their site and discovered a top-tier technology stack:

Shopify

‍Shopify is a crowd favorite for small-to-medium shops. So there’s a long list on why Shopify makes sense for Brooklinen: eCommerce-focused, easy interface, quick installation, SEO management, scalable pricing, SSL, etc.
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Google Analytics

Their usage of Google Analytics is not a surprise. This gives Brooklinen a way to track important metrics such as Average Session Time and New Website Visitors.
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Hotjar

Hotjar is becoming more and more popular as a compliment to Google Analytics. The tool allows teams to monitor the specifics of how visitors interact with components of their website.
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Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is a ‘personalization platform’, which translates to them being able to give each individual user a different website journey based on their interactions.
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Klaviyo‍

Klaviyo is an email marketing tool built specifically for eCommerce stores, with means every feature released has this use-case in mind. The Klaviyo team cares deeply about transactional data, such as abandon cart and winback emails, unlike competitors that emphasize speed and open rates.
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Solvvy

Instant access to customer service is on the rise for B2C companies. Brooklinen uses Solvvy which artificial intelligence to support customers and answer product questions.
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Yotpo

As mentioned earlier in this post, Brooklinen has a huge product review presence. Yotpo powers this critical piece of marketing.

Yotpo in action:

Google Ads‍

Google Ads are critical for eCommerce companies looking to get in front of buyers ready to instantly purchase (or research) a specific product. Brooklinen does an excellent job of being the first result in their product searches.

Ads in action:

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Facebook Ads‍

Facebook is the ultimate B2C advertising playground since users are often sharing personal interests and tendencies. Brooklinen has a vast market audience, so it makes sense to market to the platform with the largest audience.

Ads in action:

Cloudfront

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is the backbone to websites, allowing content to be stored and pulled quickly for each unique visitors. Cloudfront stores a portion of their assets on Amazon’s CDN option, Cloudfront.

Performance

A digital-first company calls for excellent digital performance. eCommerce teams have to handle the daunting balancing act of exhibiting dynamic images and videos of their product without sacrificing the website user experience. We analyzed several parts of the Brooklinen performance story:

Our top takeaways on Brooklinen’s digital performance:

• Their site interaction, specifically Bounce Rate and Pages per Visit, is phenomenal
• Brooklinen displays several heavy images, which can slow sites down
• Their images also lead the content charge
• Average load time could use improvement
• Home decor search terms have a relatively low Cost-Per-Click, thus being able to drive large crowds to landing pages
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The Shine

PR, Awards, and Initiatives

Inc.'s 3rd Fastest Growing Retail Brand
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$10M Series A Fundraising
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Good Housekeeping's Best Bed Sheets
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Launch of First Pop Up

Précis

Brooklinen is rising, fast. When you start to see metrics such as ‘9,000% growth rate’ you know that they have a special formula. Much of this has to do with the impressive founding team, Rich and Vicki, and their diligent execution to win the hearts of their target market. A high-quality product and top-notch customer service always pair nicely.

It will be interesting to see if a team can corner a market as vast as Brooklinen’s. An attempt at brick and mortar must be on the horizon with their recent dabbling in pop ups. Physical expansion is difficult, not to mention time-consuming and expensive.

But if you make your bed, you must lie in it.