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

Annual project · 2024-2025

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 The website was an outdated showcase, frozen over ten years prior.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.

The output

The twelve months produced three concrete results:

• A 35% reduction in cost per qualified lead compared to the company's previous attempts with other suppliers, reached in the sixth month of the engagement and maintained thereafter.
• A steady flow of 40-60 qualified enquiries per month from outside the region — a geography previously largely absent from the commercial portfolio.
• The production of a positioning asset — strategic brief, communication guidelines, updated visual identity — which remained as company knowledge beyond the closure of the annual mandate.

Qualitatively, the most significant outcome reported by the client was a different one: finally having a single interlocutor with whom to discuss the entire communication and acquisition function, instead of six. Operational simplification, in a company where the owner already has to manage production, timber suppliers, employees and clientele, is often worth as much as the reduction in advertising costs.