Index

• PROJECT

• BRAND/PRODUCT

• CREATIVE PROCESS

• MARKETING STRATEGY

• RESULTS

• CONCLUSION

Brand

theCHIVE, The Chivery, and Kevin Smith

eCommerce Marketing Team

• David Resto - Art Director
• Andrett Urias - Marketing Specialist
• Kevin Choy - Merchandiser & Photographer

Timeline

2-Week Design & Marketing Sprint, August 2020

Roles

• Art Direction
• Marketing Strategy
• Lead Design
• Photo Editing

Tools

• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Klaviyo
• Shopify
• Google Analytics

The Problem

The Chivery’s bread and butter is tee sales. During the pandemic, a major shift to precious metals and exclusively licensed coins set them apart from the eCommerce realm. New to the minting game, previous Bill Murray coin launches focused on piece-mailed assets to stakeholders at-need. With Kevin Smith entering the market, things would need to change.

The Solution

Previous launches were unorganized, so the marketing team decided to initiate a new process. We needed to organize, strategize, and establish an efficient workflow to make each launch moving forward as successful as it can be. This case study is the benchmark.

The Company

theCHIVE is a multifaceted digital entertainment brand built on three pillars: Humor, Hotness, and Humanity. There’s also a full-service production studio to create original content, manage photoshoots, event activations, and a community that meets offline to “party with a purpose,” which has raised over six million dollars for charity.

theCHIVE’s eCommerce shop, The Chivery, has almost two million customers and upwards of one thousand products, which is now tapping into minting collectible coins.

Visit theCHIVE and The Chivery.

Who is Kevin Smith?

Smith is an American filmmaker, actor, comedian, public speaker, comic book writer, author, and podcaster. He came to prominence with the low-budget comedy film Clerks (1994), which he wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in as the character Silent Bob of stoner duo Jay and Silent Bob.

Smith co-founded View Askew Productions with Scott Mosier, which features his cult-classic films: Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks II, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot!

Recently, Smith’s digital footprint grows increasingly larger by the day, with a comedy podcast dubbed, SModcast, Hulu’s exclusive weekly series, Spoilers, as well as the Screen Junkies web-streaming series, “Whats in the Box?”

The Product

With officially licensed Kevin Smith tee designs already in the books, theCHIVE decided to go the collectibles route and minted exclusive ‘In [Silent] Bob We Trust’ coins.

The individually numbered gold and silver coins are accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Kevin Smith and theCHIVE’s Co-Founder & CEO, John Resig.

The coins come in a variety of precious metals and sizes: 1/10th and 1oz gold, 1oz silver, and 1oz bronze.

Research

• Kevin Smith’s current marketing assets

• Social Media, Podcast, and Vlog

• Understand his love of collectibles and film

• Research other coin minters, vendors, sellers, and collectibles promotions.

References

• Comic books and Jay & Silent Bob press photos

• Coin renders and mockups

Inspiration

• Read through my favorite comics

• Watch View Askew produced movies

Sketches

• The Coin Comics BG

• Initial Email Hero

• Initial Email Coin Details

• Pre-Promo Sketches on Grid BG

• Coin Reveal with General Branding and Comics on Shelf

Create

• Using the previous Bill Murray coins stand-ins, I directed a photoshoot for each coin and its respective groupings. Not to mention, organized the comic backdrop for use across the entire campaign.

• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the marketing specialist to finalize copy and CTA’s for each deliverable.

• Build out an initial email and editorial concepts for review.

Photo Editing

Update photos and replace all old coin stand-ins with the new Kevin Smith coin renders provided from the mint facility and begin scaling for product pages and isolated editorial assets.

Design & Production

• Emails: Pre, Early Access, Launch, Back in Stock Notification Signup)

• Social & Editorial: Pre, EA, Launch, Low Qty, S/O, BIS signups, Isolated Products and COA’s

• Shop & Landing Page: Marquees, Banners, Touts, Product Gallery Images

• General Launch (House Ads)

Packaging

• Organize finalized assets and share amongst teams and stakeholders internally.

• Package finalized assets for Kevin Smith’s team to post on their platforms.

Tracking

Work with Marketing Specialist to update visuals for internal assets deck and include tracking links for retrospective metrics and benchmark template fine-tuning.

Email Strategy and Segmentation

• Pre Promotion Teaser / Sign-up for Early Access (General List)

• Early Access Presale Segments and Alternative Messaging

  • New EA signups

  • Previous Coin Purchasers

  • Previous Coin Launch Back in Stock Subscribers

  • Chive Box Subscribers

• Sold Out Recap / Back in Stock Notification Signup
  (General List)

Landing Page

• Early Access Signup

• Shop is Live

• Sold Out / BIS Signup

Social, Editorial, and House Ad Content

• Pre Promotion, Early Access, Launch, Low Quantities, Sold Out, and BIS signups (Social / Editorial)

• General Branded Launch (House Ads)

Additional Notes:

I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Marketing Specialist, Andrett, in tandem with the Creative Process. We strategized and streamlined our best course of action for this launch, and I was able to provide assets to the internal marketing deck shared amongst stakeholders, editors, and social teams.

Pregame

The initial pre-promotion was intended to tease the all-new Kevin Smith coin and open up the floodgates for theCHIVE’s audience to subscribe to the early access email list. We rolled out unique social and editorial assets in a very loose sketch mockup teaser of the KS coin and linked back to the email capture landing page.

Steady inclusions throughout all social and editorial platforms during pre-launch weekend allowed for a spike in early access captures, which sustained great traction for the next installment of this campaign.

The Early Bird Catches the Coins

We segmented the email roll-out with unique messaging for each. The incentive for Early Access was the opportunity to buy the new KS coins 24 hours before anyone else, and hindered on the fact that our previous coin launches, which partnered with Bill Murray, sold out within hours!

Snoogans

At the time of the general launch, the majority of coins were during the presale. Now is the final opportunity to reel in any Chivers that didn’t sign up for EA. Not to mention, the big promotion coming from Kevin Smith’s social accounts, which would allow us to expand our reach and capture some of his fans.

As the coins began to sell out, we opened ‘Back in Stock’ notifications signups.

Due to the lack of conversions for House Ads with (2,300 clicks and 6 only orders), we decided to remove these assets from future launches but will be giving homepage takeovers a more prominent test run.

With the success of each strategically built marketing asset and time-released messaging, the Kevin Smith coins completely sold out within days. The pre-launch hype and email capture led the charge in knowing that we’d have engaged users coming back on the day of early access to purchase these collectibles. Not to mention a fair percentage of these new customers were loyal Kevin Smith fans and folding them into theCHIVE’s already massive community says we’ll be successful collaborating with him in the future.

This streamlined strategy allows the team to focus on the creative details and less about last minute, one-off requests coming down the pipeline from editors or stakeholders who may be missing assets that could have been prepped ahead of time.

The aspects of this launch will hold true as a benchmark for future licensed collaborations with theCHIVE and Chivery.

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