Pet accessory brand collaborates with Canadian agency to boost sales during Prime Day

Expanding the business

The idea behind Tella & Stella hatched when founder Alexandre Hébert wanted to find accessories that matched his dog, Stella’s (who he affectionately called Tella), colorful personality and style. So in 2019, he launched Tella & Stella, which today showcases a collection of more than 20 dog collar and leash designs.

In February 2020, in collaboration with Novatize, an online commerce agency, Tella & Stella began selling their products on Amazon.ca to help scale their business and reach new customers. The brand’s goal was to expand their business throughout Canada (their customer base was initially regionally-focused in Quebec), while keeping an advertising cost of sales (ACOS) of 30% per year. The team at Novatize also encouraged the brand to take advantage of Prime Day to help boost impressions of their new products, increase overall sales, and to help drive category visibility.

Differentiating the brand

First, the team at Novatize focused on retail readiness, knowing they had to find a way to differentiate Tella & Stella from brands selling similar products on Amazon. So they showcased the brand’s unique and funky styles with high-quality imagery and detailed product descriptions that spoke to the brand’s versatility.

Next, the agency focused on creating a strategy that would meet the brand’s two objectives: generating a net margin of 30% in 2020, while keeping an ACOS of 30%.

To do so, Novatize started with Sponsored Products campaigns, using a combination of automatic and manual campaigns to promote the brand’s products. Since Tella & Stella was a new brand, Novatize knew they had to leverage automatic targeting to identify which keywords were most efficiently driving visibility and engagement for the brand’s ads. “Every match type was used, but broad type was our best ally at the beginning to gain a wide range of keywords to optimize our ads,” says Pier-Olivier Doyon, Marketplace Project Manager at Novatize. “After that, we switched to phrase and exact, but kept some broad type to continue to gain new opportunities.”

Novatize then saw an opportunity to leverage Sponsored Brands to help drive visibility in a cost-effective way by showcasing multiple products within one ad experience and encouraging shoppers to explore the brand’s Store. By doing so, they were able to engage shoppers and showcase the brand’s unique product catalogue in the Store, reduce the cost-per-click (CPC), and help increase sales.

To optimize both campaign types, Novatize leveraged the search term report to remove the keywords with higher spend, but lower clicks and fewer sales.

Optimizing for Prime Day

To prepare for the peak season, Novatize doubled Tella & Stella’s bids and budgets, increasing budgets to 200% during the week prior to Prime Day to help generate impressions. The agency also used up and down strategies to help increase the efficiency of the brand’s ads during the peak period. Lastly, Novatize convinced Tella & Stella to offer a $5 discount on their duo leash and collar product (which was spotlighted in the Store) to help increase visibility of their hero product.

Initially, we weren’t the biggest fans of having discounts on our products. But Novatize encouraged us to do so, which led to us having our best sales weekend in 2020. It’s critical to clarify your objectives with your agency partner to help get the most optimal results.”

— Alexandre Hébert, Founder, Tella & Stella

Measuring the results

In 2020, Novatize helped Tella & Stella achieve a 25% ACOS, with 50% of their sales generated via Amazon Ads during the last trimester of 2020.1 Also, nearly 20% of the brand’s sales were generated during the month of Prime Day (October 2020).2

"Testing and learning was key to our success. We were not afraid to challenge each other’s ideas. Yes, we are the agency and we have the expertise; however, the advertiser knows the product better than anyone. This relationship was critical to our success."

— Philippe Pâquet-De Varennes, President, Sales and Marketing, Novatize

This year, Tella & Stella expanded their collection to include cat products, and will continue to work with Novatize to promote these new products with Amazon Ads.

1 Advertiser-provided data, Canada, 2020.
2 Advertiser-provided data, Canada, 2020.