How Disco Identifies High-Intent Customers For Mack Weldon

Mack Weldon is a modern menswear brand reinventing staple pieces through premium fabrics, smart designs, and a simplified omnichannel shopping experience across eCom and retail.

The global shift to dependence on eCommerce, driven by the pandemic, recently accelerated the company’s annual revenue and growth plan. We sat down with Founder & CEO Brian Berger to unpack the brand’s strategic marketing growth leveraging Disco, covering:

Two key factors that persuaded the Mack Weldon team to trial Disco
The struggle of omnichannel marketing without defaulting to Facebook or Google
Three growth points driven by Disco, from cheaper CACs to intelligent recommendations

“It’s a win for both our team and our customers. Disco grants Mack Weldon exposure while introducing our users to opportunities with like-minded brands.”

Field Guide: Omnichannel Growth Tests

Before Disco, the Mack Weldon team orchestrated a deep dive into omnichannel digital growth strategies. This was mainly an attempt at shifting reliance away from paid ad monoliths, i.e., Facebook and Google, that were no longer worth the price point.

Brian breaks down this multi-pronged channel approach, as well as its potential shortcomings.

1. Affiliate Marketing

As enablement tech advances and publisher tolerance for ads increases, affiliate channels have boded well for Mack Weldon.

However, Brian anticipates an eventual dip in success, mainly due to consumers’ heightening awareness of paid (and thus potentially disingenuous) content.

2. Influencer Marketing

Original content — ranging from funny 10-second videos to micro-influencers staging product photoshoots — can open up direct revenue streams by leveraging creative formats that resonate across apps, from legacy platforms like Facebook to newer hubs for virality like TikTok.

3. Algorithmic Platforming

However, like most algorithm-driven marketing platforms, both organic and influencer content are left to the whims of a piece of software, not the actual end viewer.

In Mack Weldon’s case, the algorithm will dictate their product assortment, often highlighting their underwear lines while neglecting their higher-value lifestyle SKUs.

“It’s been a challenge to find the right channels to support our evolution from a basics brand to a full wardrobing solution.”

Onboarding: Disco’s Low-Risk Commitment

While on the hunt for untapped growth channels, Brian came across Disco — and was quickly drawn in by its positioning as a brand discovery network with instant returns.

He sought out other brand leaders already on the platform to gauge opinions on ROI, the integration process, and any other potential drawbacks. In doing so, he realized:

Financial and technical integration presented a low-risk commitment.
Many Disco brands shared similar missions (and likely audiences) with Mack Weldon.

Overall, Brian calls Disco a no-brainer for three reasons:

Disco empowers independent brands to stop relying on big tech for acquisitions.
Mack Weldon users also derive the benefit of discovering similar, high-quality brands.
The platform requires little-to-no implementation effort yet provides ample rewards.

“Rather than being forced to go through the Google or Facebook toll booth, Disco is ecosystem-driven, serving every single brand in the network at once.”

Post-Disco: Mack Weldon’s Three-Tiered Benefits

As a Disco-powered brand, Mack Weldon has had three key growth points driven by the network.

1. Cross-Brand Partnerships

In terms of post-Disco effects, Brian identifies the most impactful as the revenue stream generated by the ever-growing ecosystem of top-notch brands.

The Mack Weldon team can access critical data on other intra-network brands that share their customer profile across all categories and verticals, not just menswear.

As a result, they can initiate efficient partnership efforts, from co-branded email campaigns to cross-brand product recommendations, that actually reach the right audiences.

Past partnerships have also been further validated, with some of the top referral performance coming in from Disco partners the brand had previously partnered with prior to onboarding.

2. Cheaper Customer Acquisition

Disco not only cut down Mack Weldon’s need to pour capital into mainstream ad channels, but it also provided a far cheaper, more efficient acquisition method altogether.

For ongoing and future consumer growth, the brand now operates through smaller-scale, higher-quality, and more targeted tactics.

It’s been a welcome divergence, as Brian puts it, from the expectation for challenger brands to stage large-scale, disruptive campaigns with little guarantee of success.

3. Optimized Post Purchase

Before onboarding with Disco, Mack Weldon’s post-purchase flows had room for optimization and personalization. The brand typically surveyed buyers to gather intel for future marketing efforts, but even their wealth of responses would generate unreliable data.

Nowadays, Disco enables the brand to maximize this undervalued but prime real estate of their user funnel. Some examples include:

Syndicated post-purchase offers on product bundles by partner brands
One-click upsell offers for post-checkout users to save on shipping costs
Disco’s data-driven recommendation engine for highly relevant product suggestions

Brian points out that his team uses Disco as a post-purchase re-engagement tool.

Out of all the brand’s conversions attributed to Disco over the past quarter, they saw that approximately 36% were attributed to existing, yet disengaged customers that hadn’t bought in the last 6+ months – indicating a powerful re-engagement use case for merchants of all sizes on the Disco platform.