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- Brooklinen's Rapid Growth In a Competitive Bedding Industry
Brooklinen's Rapid Growth In a Competitive Bedding Industry
Meta (Three C's), Lowering CAC and Personalisation
Hey team,
I’m excited to get into some performance marketing content for you. This week I’ll be looking into Brooklinen. An effective digital marketing brand with a high-quality product that resonates.
I like their growth story. There’s so much we can take away and apply to our own strategies and campaigns. It shows us the power of DTC marketing and how quickly you can scale up by identifying key opportunity gaps in the market.
Enjoy 🙂
— Dev
In today’s edition:
Strategy: Unpacking the Three C’s (Creative rotation, Custom Audience and Consistent Messaging)
Optimisation: Lowering costs through AI and automation
Email: Personalisation tactics that work
FEATURE CASE STUDY
Brooklinen

Brooklinen's success stems from identifying a gap in the bedding market, offering quality products at competitive prices, and effectively leveraging digital marketing and DTC strategies.
Founded in 2014 by Rich and Vicki Fulop, the company started with a simple idea: provide high-quality bedding at affordable prices. They bootstrapped the business, initially raising over $230,000 through Kickstarter. Shortly after, word-of-mouth marketing kicked in, they started working with influencers and built up a strong social media presence (both organic & paid) — Brooklinen quickly gained traction. Their consumer model allowed them to offer premium products at a competitive price, a powerful hook for their content to get people into their eco-system.
In two short years, they managed to bring it all together and hit a whopping $25 million in revenue. If you want to read more about their general business model you can check this article out.
STRATEGY
The Three C's
Brooklinen has stuck to the fundamentals. Their meta-ads are tailored to new customers, people on the fence about buying from them and buyers who are ready but need motivation in the form of limited offers or strong CTAs.
They maintain best practices and lead with aesthetic creatives that capture attention. Copywise, they craft pointy direct response messages.
What makes their approach effective is their focus on the three Cs:
Creative rotation: Frequently refreshing ad creatives to prevent ad fatigue and maintain high engagement. This month alone, they have released 134 ad variations to test on Meta.
Custom audience: This is the easiest win any brand can pick up. Meta’s algorithm works well to drive conversions from first-party data. Brooklinen creates lookalike audiences based on engagement with their previous ads and content, finding potential customers that closely resemble their existing customer base.
Consistent messaging: They consistently communicate clear value props about comfort and quality. Customer reviews and testimonials are also used regularly to maintain social proof. I would assume this is part of their ‘business-as-usual' campaign that caters to new shoppers. Tactically, they focus on seasonal thematic campaigns (e.g. holiday sales, summer refresh etc), product launches and promotions.

OPTIMISATION
Evolving the Strategy AI
They’ve been running Facebook ads for a while since 2016 (if not, earlier). By integrating new tools and new products they’ve been able to maintain their performance over time. During the last cyber week, they tested out the advantage+ shopping campaign, where they leveraged automated feed-based campaigns to launch ads based on the content in the user’s feed.
This test and optimisation was a success. It drove 45% higher conversion rates compared, to 12% lower CPMs and 8% lower CPC vs their business-as-usual campaigns. They leaned on Advantage+ Shopping Campaign, in which they were able to make contextual ads at scale using a tool like Smartly.
Here’s why this approach worked for them:
Testing: Introducing ASC+ ahead of the last Cyber week was intentional, which allowed Brooklinen to structure their campaigns to host over 150 ads through one consolidated structure. By combining all audiences into one asset, they let the algorithm optimise between new and existing customers through machine learning and AI.
Automated feed-based campaigns: Using an automation tool like Smartly, Brooklinen were able to use their existing product catalogue and automate dynamic ad creation. Using dynamic product ads, they were able to show products that are relevant to the potential customers based on their browsing history and interest.
EMAIL MARKETING
Personalisation and Triggered Sends
Brooklinen has its performance marketing strategy down-packed to maintain strong conversion rates and a personalised customer experience, which has helped it generate more incremental sales over time. Their email strategy focuses on the following:
Personalisation: Campaigns are tailored to individual customers based on previous engagement, browsing behaviour, and purchases. By doing this they can keep the content relevant and in line with the customer’s buying journey.
Triggered sends: Again, emails are sent based on specific customer actions, such as cart abandonment or post-purchase follow-ups. For example, instead of sending out a generic abandoned cart email, they focus on value props rather than just listing abandoned products. A great way to ease buyer remote and increase purchase confidence.
Curiosity-based subject lines: They are big on creating a sense of anticipation and aim to encourage people to open the email. Creating buzz through email before a major sale event like Black Friday is a good example. Brooklinen sends an email that teases upcoming discounts without giving too much away, building excitement and encouraging customers to add it to their calendars.

DIGITAL TOOLS
Brooklinen’s Tech Stack
Website - Shopify
CRM & Live chat - Gladly
Marketing automation - Postscript
A/B testing - Yotta
RESOURCES
Further Reading
👋 That’s all for today, thanks for tuning in!
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