Case studies · Corporate Strategy
Case study · Corporate Strategy 2023 — 2026 Multi-year mandate

Umbrian bespoke furniture maker — repositioning and digital channel

An artisanal bespoke furniture maker, deep roots in Umbria, a lifetime of clientele built on local word-of-mouth, and the impossibility of speaking to a wider market. Twelve months to rebuild the company's voice and open an acquisition channel that did not exist before.

Sector
Artisanal carpentry · bespoke home furniture
Geography
Umbria, national vocation
Mandate type
Multi-year mandate · 2023-2026
Practice
Corporate Strategy

The context

The company is one of those Umbrian furniture workshops where the smell of fresh wood reaches you before you enter. A carpentry that has worked to bespoke for decades, with experience not found in catalogues and a historical clientele built on thirty years of work done properly. Bedrooms, full-wall bookcases, internal staircases in solid walnut: the kind of pieces commissioned once in a lifetime.

The problem, on the eve of the mandate, was that the same company capable of producing these pieces had never found a way to talk about itself beyond local word-of-mouth. The website was an outdated showcase, frozen over ten years prior. Online traffic was residual. Enquiries arrived almost exclusively from people who already knew the company in person, or had been referred by previous clients. A commercial machine that worked, but within a narrow geographic radius and at a level of incoming enquiries insufficient to saturate production capacity.

Beneath the surface of the commercial problem lay something deeper: a disorder of external suppliers accumulated over time, each responsible for a small piece (an agency for the old website, an SEO consultant who no longer responded, a local photographer for the catalogue, some intermittent attempts at advertising entrusted to acquaintances), none with the overall vision.

The mandate

The annual mandate had two stated objectives: (1) rebuilding the company's digital voice coherently with its artisanal identity, and (2) opening a structured customer acquisition channel on paid media, capable of bringing qualified enquiries from outside the region.

Implicit but equally central, a third objective: to bring order to the supplier chain, replacing fragmentation with a single interlocutor responsible for the entire commercial-digital perimeter.

The approach

The work developed along two parallel axes.

Axis one — repositioning. Before touching any execution, a phase of work on the company's positioning: what really differentiates it from industrial furniture makers competing on price, who are the customers for whom it makes sense to be this kind of company, what language — visual and verbal — restores the quality of the work without sliding into generic luxury aesthetic. An eight-page positioning brief guided all subsequent decisions.

Axis two — execution. Opening of structured campaigns on Meta and Google, built around the positioning defined in phase one. Not a standard "media plan" but a campaign calibrated on a precise customer: the professional or manager aged 40-60 renovating their home once in a lifetime and seeking real quality, not industrial finishing. Monthly iteration of creative, continuous optimisation of cost per lead, qualification of enquiries before handover to the company.

For an artisanal company, repositioning is not a marketing exercise. It is an exercise of internal clarity on who one wants to be when speaking to those who do not yet know you.

The infrastructure built

Behind the campaigns sits a fully proprietary digital stack, built and maintained over three years, running the entire cycle from the first ad impression to home delivery of the furniture. No off-the-shelf subscriptions, no fragmented vendors: one architecture, one point of accountability.

The output

Three years of paid media (April 2023 – May 2026, €74,013 total spend) produced measurable, documented results:

Site visits from ads
91,016 landing page views at €0.13 average (best €0.08)
Video views
1,615,056 ThruPlay at €0.006 average
Reach
59.6M impressions · 6.2M people reached
Campaigns managed
120+ active campaigns over the period

Beyond acquisition, the same system handled the company's own recruitment: 163 job applications gathered at an average of €1.99 each — a total recruitment spend of €323. The qualitative result reported by the client was equally important: a 35% reduction in cost per qualified lead versus previous suppliers, and finally a single interlocutor for the entire communication and acquisition function, instead of six.

Operational simplification, in a company where the owner already manages production, timber suppliers, employees and clientele, is often worth as much as the reduction in advertising costs.

The general lesson. Italian artisanal SMEs do not have a product problem. They have a voice problem: the excellence they produce is often superior to their capacity to tell it. Repositioning is not cosmetic — it is the moment when a company decides who it wants to be when it speaks to those who do not yet know it. Corporate Strategy applies this step before any channel execution.

← All case studies · Corporate Strategy Practice

The client is described anonymously for reasons of contractual confidentiality. The description of the mandate and outcomes faithfully reflects the work performed. For enquiries: managing.partner@costantinilawfirm.capital