8-Figure Skincare Brand COCOSOLIS grows online sales by 239% with Olifant

About the brand

Since its beginning in 2014, COCOSOLIS stood out as the brand of choice when it comes to natural sun tanning and skincare. The organic ingredients, guaranteed fast results and delicious scents are just a few of the reasons people love their products. The brand’s leading collection consists of summer-oriented cosmetics, such as tanning oils, after-sun, and SPF products. Their “off-season” and all-year product line takes care of the skin imperfections like cellulite, stretch marks, and dead skin.

What’s up with COCOSOLIS?

COCOSOLIS saw great success in its first couple of years of business. The brand was selling in over 20 countries, generating 7 figures across multiple marketing channels and they wanted to scale beyond that.

After moving from agency to agency and building an in-house team, they still couldn’t get that steady and consistent growth they had on their board. That’s then our paths crossed.

How we’ve approached it

The first thing we did after we joined forces was to develop a funnel, fully-based on the customer behavior of their existing customer base.

Since the cosmetics market is highly competitive, we needed to create a distinctive brand image to generate higher consumer interest and beat the “proven” generic brands that people already knew and have been using for years.

What we found out left us speechless. They did not utilize the highest ROI marketing channel available - email marketing.

That is the single most powerful channel to monetize the loyal customers that love and vouch for your products.

We developed automations for cart abandonment, browse abandonment, win-back series, and more. The next step was to create a newsletter plan and execution.

After the outstanding results from our first month of working together, we decided to create a comprehensive A/B testing schedule for their email marketing channel. The goal was to ensure a fully-optimized strategy was in place to squeeze the highest ROI possible.

Based on the user-generated content they have, we knew their audience was already a huge consumer of the social media.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t use that as an advantage at the time we began our partnership as it was the beginning of the winter season, and the weather conditions wouldn’t allow going to the beach.

Their best content was basically unusable. During that time, they would usually go into hibernation mode and adjust their strategies for the upcoming year and develop new products to launch.

Of course, they were launching a few ads here and there, but tanning beds are not good enough.
Their best bet was to double down on the skincare products like the anti-cellulite and stretch mark oils, but even then the ROAS wasn’t there and business was bleeding money.
Speaking from experience, we know that this isn’t sustainable. Such a large business can’t afford to lose money in three seasons and try and raise as much revenue as possible during the summer period.

With ad accounts being suspended all the time, algorithm changes, policy, tracking, and page updates, you don’t want to take such a risk. And that was before Covid-19 became a thing.
We were expected to try and improve the off-season situation if we could, as no other agency they have ever worked with actually realized any profits.

Our agreement was to scale the company during the summer period, but this was something that we couldn’t cope. We really wanted to show our skills and knowledge and took on this challenge.
As we were getting momentum launching different landing pages, offers, ad angles and audiences, the world shut down completely.

With everything closed, we saw a great opportunity. There was only one way for the people to feel excited and rewarded again - to shop online.
Crafting the images and copies took us a few days and we launched immediately. The feedback was amazing, people loved that we gave them something to get busy with. That was a huge success because this strategy alone created a very loyal customer base.

We ran those ads completely based on weather programs and websites all around the world. The people loved the idea and blew us with UGC, which we used to share their joy and excitement. This started the snowball as it was getting sunnier every single day.

The next three months, March to May, we sold out most of the products completely. That has never happened to COCOSOLIS and based on the previous periods, this stock was supposed to last for a very long time.

We were able to achieve the biggest milestone of the company - not only that the business hit 8-figures for the first time, we also generated more revenue than the past 4 years combined.
Since the beginning of our partnership, we have helped COCOSOLIS expand to 6 new countries and launch 7 additional products to their portfolio.

Olifant's solution

"Olifant Digital is like an internal marketing team for us, not an outsourced company. They really do care about our brand & growth."

Plamen Stefanov — CEO at COCOSOLIS