The Koio Playbook: How to Leverage Disco as an Arbitrage Opportunity

Koio is a New York-based luxury footwear brand focused on meeting customer demand for luxury and sustainability. Today, the brand is heavily focused on expanding its product portfolio while ramping up growth across both eCommerce and retail acquisition channels.

We sat down with Koio’s VP of Marketing, Joe Anhalt, to dive deep on:

• How Disco upgraded Koio’s post-purchase experience
• The tactical value of streamlined, accurate metric reporting
• Why Disco’s pricing and flexibility suited the brand’s growth model

“To sum it up, Disco is a win-win-win for Koio, partner brands, and the customer. No other marketing tool we use offers that trio of benefits.”

Koio’s Onboarding: Letting Disco Works Its Magic

Joe got introduced to Disco through a mutual friend. When he decided to sign up, he pointed out that his team wasn’t forced to go through a rigorous onboarding or pay $15,000 a month to engineers to customize the tool. 

Instead, Joe quickly set up Disco’s platform for Koio and let it work its magic – humming along in the background to help his team identify new brands to partner with on the marketing front while also targeting its most high-intent shoppers via dynamic discounts and upsells.

Koio is still small and scrappy and, in Joe’s words, doesn’t have a massive budget to experiment with new tools. In his experience, most marketing software is incredibly costly and often comes with lengthy contract periods and hidden strings attached.

Unlike other tools, Disco’s pricing and flexibility suited Koio perfectly.

Joe rattles off a shortlist of Disco’s immediate benefits:

1. At the top of his list – there’s zero risk involved
2. End-to-end onboarding took less than a week
3. Simple and straightforward implementation workflows

Additionally, as a luxury brand, Koio cares a lot about the aesthetic, the feel, and the user experience. Disco met those requirements out of the box with intuitively designed tooling.

“When you pair the outsized value that Disco delivers versus the low costs, it was a no-brainer to test it out. Since onboarding, we can’t imagine going back.”

The Tactical Value in Streamlined Reporting

Joe stresses that Disco’s benefits have continued to compound every week, growing in tandem with the Disco ecosystem of new merchants. In his words, Disco is an additive channel for awareness and acquisition while increasing metrics around word of mouth and referrals. 

Critically, Disco serves as a warm referral not from another customer, but another brand.

Joe also emphasizes the importance of targeted, quantifiable metrics for running an effective marketing campaign. He relies on the ease of Disco’s reporting for:

• Clicks and views
• Return on ad spend
• Overall channel efficiency
• Impressions shown for other brands

Joe has seen that, despite its relative newness, Disco is already competitive with Koio’s other acquisition channels – an insight that has led his team to double down on the platform. 

“The beauty of Disco is that as more brands jump on the platform, there’s no limit on the number of new impressions and awareness that we can drive."

How Disco Upgraded Koio’s Post-Purchase Experience

Joe highlights that Disco helped Koio design a much richer experience than previously available. Before Disco, Koio had a one-question post-purchase survey: “How did you hear about us?”

While this offered Koio useful data, it couldn’t drive a repeat purchase or additional value. 

Disco drives just as much value for customers as brands by pushing suggestions like “You might like these other brands” or “You just shopped for Koio, but maybe you didn't buy a cleaning kit.” Then, its ML-driven engine recommends a great add-on product to your order.

Joe has been impressed with how much the “one-click” upsell increases the average order value with just the click of a button. He stresses that the whole Disco ecosystem delivers massive value for Koio customers and the company. He also touches on the value of partnerships.

With Disco, Koio found new brands with high rates of audience overlap that Joe didn’t expect.

For example, Modern Fuel, a luxury writing instruments brand, drove a ton of traffic Koio’s way. Their customers were highly aligned with the Koio persona: predominantly men, high earners, highly educated, and an appreciation for luxury goods. 

Through Disco’s platform, Joe connected with and collaborated on marketing campaigns with brands like Modern Fuel.

“People buying a $150 pen won’t think too hard about a $300 pair of sneakers. They’re both premium products that look great. This mutual affinity was a surprising win that we discovered early and has yielded ongoing benefits.”

Using Disco as an Arbitrage Opportunity

As Facebook and Instagram turn into an exercise of throwing money out into the abyss, Joe has seen the competitiveness of the marketing landscape rapidly accelerate. 

In contrast, Disco allows for connection with like-minded brands to combat rising costs. 

Critically, Disco’s level of intent is higher than an average top-of-funnel awareness campaign.

Brands used to be able to get away with just Facebook and Instagram. Now, any savvy merchant needs to have Facebook, Instagram, Google, Disco, influencers, TikTok, affiliates, and word of mouth working in tandem. In Joe’s words, brands need to find new arbitrage opportunities.

“If you can partner with an untapped channel or new merchant that might help diversify your marketing mix, you need to go for it. Disco gives us that edge.”

Disco Dashboards: What Data Koio Tracks

As an organization, Koio has hyper-focused on acquiring as much pre-purchase, first-party data as possible. Koio seeks to own more and more of the one-to-one communication with clients.

Disco provides a simple dashboard with transparent, real-time data around shopper insights. This helps increase Joe’s confidence in knowing which customer segments to target.

Regarding the metrics themselves, Joe specifically tracks:

1. Repeat buyer tendencies
2. Sale-only vs. regular customers
3. Time delta from first purchase to second purchase
4. Lifetime value across different cohorts and segments

As an organization, Koio relies on what the data is saying. Disco allows Joe and Koio to track customers and their buying behaviors, opening up the ability to speed up the purchase cycle.

Joe has seen firsthand how Disco’s out-of-the-box experience and data unlock trends and learnings. In his eyes, the low effort required for a high return is still just scratching the surface.

“My advice? Test drive Disco immediately. There's no risk involved, no upfront payment, and minimal creative production. For us, the ROI was immediate.”