PARTNER CONTENT
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on healthy eating or specific cuisines. We’ re planning to copy our UK marketing strategy and create a US community of‘ Crimpiteers’ but advertising is around 30- to-40 percent more expensive, so we’ re simultaneously building retail relationships with niche kitchenware stores.”
As social media has played a significant role in the company’ s growth, we ask Mike more about this strategy.“ We always knew that socials would be a great platform as our product is very visual and its use is easily explained through video,” he states.“ However, one of the best things we ever decided to do was inviting people to join a Facebook community once they purchased from us. This has grown mostly organically to around 125,000 customers, or selfnamed Crimpiteers, in the UK, who upload photos, recipes, and top tips for using our gadgets. We also use influencer marketing, with many influencers reporting their videos of our products as one of their top three performing posts.
The power of people
“ This community is essentially our new product development and innovation arm, as our customers are constantly coming up with new ideas. It also allows us to gain information on when people tend to use our products and their favorite fillings, which not only influences product development but also shapes our marketing message.
“ We also have a customer service team overseeing the community, who report what our customers are asking for. Once we have an idea, we have in-house product designers to work on the design and we create models using a 3D printer. We also have a kitchen set up in the office to test products and make tweaks to the design before we send them to our partner to produce plastic injection molded samples.
▼ Mike Harper and Ian Critchlow
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