Case Study: Doubling DTC Revenue for a 75-Year-Old Swiss Tool Brand in 6 Months

“Sales volume was so high that our US team considered increasing shipping prices to slow orders down.”

Jean-Christophe Jouve
Global Finance Director at FELCO

For over 75 years, FELCO built a product so good that professionals worldwide wouldn’t use anything else. Swiss-made pruning tools, trusted by arborists and master gardeners who knew exactly what they were buying and why.

But by 2025, that professional loyalty, as valuable as it was, had become a ceiling. A much larger, underserved home gardening market was right there, and FELCO’s digital presence wasn’t speaking to it.

What followed was a six-month transformation in collaboration with scandiweb, bringing FELCO’s digital strategy from fragmented channel execution to a fully integrated DTC growth engine that delivered CHF 3.9M in revenue, +108% YoY growth, and the strongest Black Friday sale in FELCO’s digital history.

About FELCO

Founded in Switzerland, FELCO is globally recognized for manufacturing premium pruning and cutting tools used by professionals worldwide – the brand has long been synonymous with precision engineering and exceptional craftsmanship.

As DTC commerce became a growing strategic priority, FELCO identified an opportunity to expand beyond its professional base and reach the much larger home gardening segment, without compromising the premium positioning that defined the brand. At the same time, international expansion meant multiple markets and multiple digital channels, all running independently of each other.

Project goals

Main objectives at the start of our collaboration in July 2025 were to:

• Double DTC revenue YoY
• Achieve ROAS consistently above 4.0 across paid media
• Expand the customer base beyond professional buyers
• Build centralized performance visibility across markets
• Create a repeatable, scalable DTC operating model
• Execute the campaign following a tight timeline, with Black Friday only 4 months away.

Problem

Each channel – paid media, SEO, email, analytics, and CX – operated and reported independently. There was no unified picture of how a customer moved throughout touchpoints, where they dropped off, or what was actually driving revenue.

The issues showed up as:

• No cross-channel attribution or unified performance model
• Paid media profitability invisible by market, segment, and campaign type
• SEO disconnected from lifecycle strategy and conversion flows
• Limited email list segmentation and no meaningful automation
• GA4 and dataLayer inconsistencies
• Customer journey gaps at onboarding and post-purchase
• UX and messaging for professionals, creating friction for casual users.

Before and after: FELCO’s digital transformation

Solution

Rather than optimizing channels independently, scandiweb established a centralized growth operating model and launched a fully integrated marketing campaign. We took end-to-end responsibility for strategy, prioritization, and execution across paid media, SEO, AEO, email, analytics, CX, CRO, creative production, and development. Everything was oriented around the same funnel, audiences, and commercial targets.

Audience strategy and target personas

FELCO was beloved by professionals, but growth required repositioning the brand to resonate with the much larger, underserved home gardener audience. We treated this as a target audience expansion. Professionals remained a core audience, while we tried to make FELCO legible, appealing, and accessible to people who had never thought of themselves as the kind of person who uses professional pruning tools, and who would, once introduced correctly, become exactly that.

The two customer personas we built the strategy around:

• The Passionate Home Gardener – someone who values quality and durability, cares deeply about sustainability, and is genuinely invested in their garden; they can be overwhelmed by choice, so they need confidence and guidance.
• The Aspirational Hobbyist – drawn more by aesthetics and lifestyle than precision; they discover through social media and respond to seasonal projects, educational content, beautiful imagery, and the idea that the right tool is also the right statement.

Full-funnel paid media

We rebuilt the paid media architecture around intent and lifecycle stage:

• Upper-funnel creative introduced FELCO to home gardeners using emotional storytelling, like the satisfaction of a clean cut and pride of a well-kept garden
• Mid-funnel campaigns targeted active researchers with product-specific content
• Lower-funnel retargeting used dynamic creative adapted to browsing behavior.

Microsoft Ads, Pinterest, and TikTok were integrated as new channels into the acquisition strategy:

• TikTok for emotional resonance with younger home gardeners
• Pinterest for aspirational lifestyle content tied to seasonal moments
• Microsoft for capturing high-intent searches at lower cost. 

AI-powered creative workflow enabled over 300 ads deployed during BFCM.

SEO and AEO strategy

A full technical SEO and AEO audit addressed immediate gaps and longer-term search behavior, helping FELCO capture non-branded, high-intent searches from home gardeners and hobbyists:

• Technical SEO cleanup and crawl optimization
• Category tree expansion and navigation restructuring
• PLP and PDP content optimization
• Localized SEO for key European markets.

Alongside traditional SEO, we invested significant effort in answer engine optimization. A growing share of queries, particularly in product research and “how to choose” questions, is now answered directly by AI-powered engines, often without the user ever clicking through to a website. For a brand like FELCO, where purchase decisions frequently start with questions (what’s the best pruning tool for roses, do I need professional tools for home use, and similar), visibility in AI-generated answers is becoming as important as ranking on page one.

We restructured content so that it could be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines: rewriting key pages to lead with direct, concise answers to the questions FELCO’s target audiences were asking, building supporting educational content to establish topical authority, and ensuring that structured data and page architecture made it easy for AI systems to extract and attribute FELCO’s content accurately. 

Analytics and performance intelligence

The analytics infrastructure rebuild included GA4 implementation, dataLayer architecture, consent management, and reporting dashboards to support reliable, revenue-aligned decision-making.

For the first time, FELCO has:

• Cohort-level analysis by customer segment
• Cross-channel attribution across paid, SEO, and email
• Funnel drop-off diagnostics by step and audience
• Retention and repeat purchase tracking
• Campaign-level performance tied to contribution margin.

Lifecycle and retention marketing

We built a structured lifecycle engine and designed automated flows across the full customer journey: welcome and onboarding, product education, cart recovery, post-purchase engagement, cross-sell sequences, and seasonal gifting campaigns. Weekly newsletters were integrated into the broader marketing calendar, allowing CRM activity to reinforce paid media and seasonal pushes. 

Customer experience transformation

After the CX audit identified friction points specific to non-professional users, such as navigation and discovery that assumed product knowledge, and incomplete post-purchase experiences, we introduced, through UX redesign:

• Clearer product segmentation for professional vs. home gardener
• Simplified navigation and category structure
• Stronger tool selection guidance and product education
• Improved mobile usability
• Better integration of brand messaging throughout the journey.

Flagship campaign – BFCM 2025: professional-grade tools made accessible for every home gardener

Black Friday became the clearest expression of what this integrated model could do. We ran as a single coordinated experience throughout channels.

Paid media drove VIP early-access sign-ups ahead of the public launch, with intent-driven search and social campaigns leading on FELCO’s craftsmanship and seasonal offers.

Landing pages were rebuilt to lead with storytelling and simplify product selection for non-professional visitors – benefits first, technical specifications available but never required.

Email and SMS delivered early access to VIP members, then segmented flows throughout the sale window: educational content, offer reminders, abandoned cart, and checkout nudges, all coordinated with the paid calendar.

Retargeting showed dynamic product ads with messaging adapted to browsing behavior and funnel stage.

Post-purchase flows kept the conversation going after checkout with onboarding emails, usage tips, cross-sell recommendations, and a gifting push to satisfied BFCM buyers.

Results

2025 DTC performance

• +107.87% YoY revenue
• 4–5 ROAS consistently
• +208% traffic

What started as fragmented digital activity became a repeatable DTC growth system. This foundation helped us double DTC revenue year over year while expanding into new markets.

Jean-Christophe Jouve
Global Finance Director at FELCO

July–November (campaign window)

• +207% YoY DTC revenue, the strongest July–November period in FELCO’s digital history

November–December (peak season) YoY

• +167.2% revenue
• +154.4% transactions
• +5.0% AOV – given it was the most discount-driven week in the retail calendar, the campaign grew volume without requiring margin destruction to do it
• -76.7% add-to-cart drop-off

Black Friday week (24 Nov–1 Dec) YoY

• +292.1% revenue
• +828.6% PPC revenue
• +334.4% SEO revenue

The campaign delivered strong results. But the more interesting thing about this campaign is what it was actually doing. FELCO is a 75-year-old precision tool brand with deep credibility in a professional niche. We had to expand the definition of who FELCO is for without losing what made the brand worth expanding.

It required brand repositioning and performance marketing to align and meet a November deadline. The creatives had to work emotionally for a new audience while remaining honest about what FELCO is, and all the campaign activities had to scale a new segment without cannibalizing the professional base. The results are evidence that it worked. Alongside those numbers is the system that produced them: a fully integrated growth model that FELCO now owns.

Thinking about your DTC growth? If you are currently launching into a new segment or market, or trying to connect fragmented digital channels into something that performs – we’ve done it, and we can help. Get in touch with the scandiweb Integrated Growth team today.

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