Warm Home Designs, a home decor company, uses Amazon Ads in Mexico to help build brand awareness

Established in 2015, Warm Home Designs is a US home decor company that sells stylish home products including window curtains, tablecloths and other drapery in a variety of designs and sizes. The brand found that customers who discovered their unique offerings were likely to make a purchase; however, as a small company, they needed help increasing brand awareness to reach relevant audiences. Soon after the company was established, they started using Amazon Ads solutions. After successfully advertising in the US, Warm Home Designs saw an opportunity to grow their brand further and launched in Mexico in 2020.

According to eMarketer, Mexico is ranked No. 9 within the top 10 countries with the fastest online retail growth, expected to increase 18% vs. last year.¹ Warm Home Designs recognised they had an opportunity for their products to reach new audiences in the country with the help of Remote Fulfilment with FBA. Through the programme, the company sells their products directly to shoppers in Mexico, and Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) completes the orders using Warm Home Designs’ inventory in US fulfilment centres.

In the US, Warm Home Designs strives to maintain advertising cost of sales (ACOS) around 25% for new-to-brand customers to help drive profitability.² When they launched campaigns in Mexico, their goal was to increase brand awareness while maintaining a reasonable ACOS. The company currently uses 70% of their total advertising budget with Amazon Ads, with 10% dedicated to ads in Mexico.³

Expanding a brand to a new country means encountering a new set of challenges, like launching an ad campaign in a different language. Warm Home Designs used Amazon Ads tools and features to help navigate creating successful campaigns in Mexico. To begin familiarising themselves with shopping habits in Mexico, the company used the Brand Analytics feature in Seller Central to gain insight into the most popular keywords and shopping queries.

Amazon Ads helps make launching and managing campaigns in multiple countries easy. Advertisers can link separate nation-specific accounts into a single global manager account in the ad console to have a single dashboard for all their advertising on Amazon. For Warm Home Designs, being able to create new campaigns, and replicate existing campaigns, for a new country in the ad console made it easier for them to start advertising in Mexico.

“We like that Amazon Ads has the same user interface for Mexico as the US”, said Max Gurevich, president of Warm Home Designs. “That helped us easily familiarize ourselves and start advertising right away when we started selling in Mexico.” And with the new multi-country advertising campaign create feature, brands can create and copy multiple campaigns in one or more nations in one click.

When Warm Home Designs launched Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns, they used the suggested-keyword localisation feature in the ad console to automatically translate their keywords. “We had a language barrier when we started to create listings in Mexico,” said Gurevich. “The suggested-keyword feature helps us easily generate a list of Spanish keywords that we use to help reach shoppers.” Warm Home Designs also credits their regular meetings with an Amazon Ads specialist for helping them grow. The company meets monthly with an ads specialist to discuss their strategy in Mexico.

Warm Home Designs used a combination of Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display ads in Mexico. Sponsored Brands help companies drive discovery of their brand among customers shopping for similar products. Building brand awareness was a key component to Warm Home Designs’ ad strategy in Mexico.

“Brand awareness is an underrated part of an advertising strategy. We think it’s much easier to sell your products to customers that are familiar with your brand,” said Gurevich. “By extensively advertising our brand with Amazon’s ad products, we helped to successfully create awareness and now shoppers look for our brand directly when shopping on Amazon. The focus we put on Amazon Ads definitely supported our brand advertising in Mexico.”

In addition to Sponsored Brands, Warm Home Designs used additional self-service solutions with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display to complement their brand awareness campaign and help drive sales.

Warm Home Designs has seen strong results from their campaigns since launching in Mexico in 2020. Since the beginning of 2022, the company’s ad-attributed sales are more than 60% of their overall sales in Mexico.⁴ This is higher than their ad-attributed sales in the US. Advertising in a new country also helped increase sales in different product categories.

“Since we began selling our products in Mexico through Remote Fulfilment with FBA, we’ve seen that different product lines are popular in Mexico than in the US”, said Gurevich. “It’s helped us balance sales between our different categories.” The company plans to continue building connections with customers in Mexico by launching a Store in the near future. Stores help brands share their story and products in-depth through a multipage immersive shopping experience.

In this episode of This Is Small Business, Gurevich shares the challenges that he has faced when entering a new country. He shares his dos and don’ts after successfully entering Canada and Mexico via Amazon. From making sure you switch up your marketing strategy to better suit the new country and trusting your customer feedback to taking on the fear of a new language, Gurevich has a wealth of helpful tips to share. Listen to the 11-minute episode now.

This Is Small Business explores the journey to success for small-business owners by diving deep into the pivotal moments they have faced and conquered along the way. Brought to you by Amazon, this podcast is delivered through the unique perspective of a curious millennial trying to figure out what it takes to be a successful small-business owner today. Episodes feature small-business owners and industry experts from all walks of life who offer trends analysis, life lessons and a different point of view. This Is Small Business invites you to dig deep and find the tools you need to start, build and grow your small business.