Peppermint Products Finds Its Offering and Audience Niche With Shopify

In 2012, Roman Luyken started his company Peppermint Products, making artfully-designed cardboard furniture. As an artist and product designer, Roman soon noticed a divergence: the products he was most interested in making were not the ones that seemed to sell best. While friends and family continued to share positive feedback about his products, he realized this didn’t correspond to sales. It wasn’t until he created the rope collection, which included a high-quality coat hanger and hooks for the wardrobe, that he experienced commercial success.

Challenge 

Trying to figure out how to market Peppermint Products has been an ongoing learning opportunity for the brand. Early on, they’d attend design market trade shows, which were a great way to source first-hand consumer insights but required a lot of resources and time. The team tried email marketing, but with around 50 products across multiple categories and as many as 150 differentiated products in their inventory, it was hard to determine the right audiences to target. 

In 2021, after a flurry of supply chain issues, Peppermint Products narrowed its focus to its most accessible products: the coat hanger and hooks.With a narrowed offering, it could hone its marketing strategy. It also did consumer surveys, which indicated its high-value audiences were design-minded individuals between 25–35 years old, hotels, and fashion retailers.

Peppermint Products set out to reach these key audiences to try and grow its customer list based solely on its new product focus.

Roman tried working with several leading email marketing suites, but found they lacked the flexibility and localization capabilities he needed.

Solution

Peppermint Products decided to use Shopify Email to create its email marketing campaigns. The team used Shopify’s customer segmentation to easily build segments to target the B2B group of hotels. The segmentation editor offered the optimum level of complexity, with specific filters the team could combine to build the exact segment they wanted.

Another key segment created for the B2B audience was sorting customers by their location within or outside Germany. These two groups were charged differently for taxes and, before the segmentation tool was released, the team would manually change the wholesale discount code to make sure taxes were considered. Now it can share one wholesale discount that matches the correct segment for accurate pricing.

The ability to segment by email actions was another capability that saved the team time and effort in managing their campaigns. While they used to manually tag emails that were bouncing or not being opened in order to delete them, the team built a segment for customers whose email addresses bounced, who unsubscribed, or who marked the email as spam. Now they can easily update their email marketing list by removing emails that populate in the dynamically-updated segment.

Results

With the help of customer segments, Roman and the team at Peppermint Products can now email their diverse markets in the right language. They’ve saved time on customer data management and processes that previously involved lots of manual workarounds. And most importantly, the business has direct segments that continue to grow. This means the business can continue to connect with its high-value customers and incrementally build new products to meet their needs.

I see a huge advantage in having all my customers together in one platform… whatever is there actually works and the trust factor for that working is really high.

Roman and the team are looking forward to including even more personalization in their future automation strategies, and they’re keeping an eye on the Shopify changelog for ongoing improvements to Shopify’s marketing tools.

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