Case Studies

SIMKHAI

Discover how we’ve helped our clients get ahead with cohesive customer acquisition strategies.

Finding new customers at scale by beta testing Shopify Audiences.

SERVICES:
Social Media AdvertisingLead Generation & First-Party Data Management

Expanding reach to new, high-net-worth audiences
SIMKHAI had built a loyal international customer base, but the acquisition engine underneath it was narrow. The brand's growth had historically leaned on lookalike audiences and dynamic targeting mechanisms that work by finding more people who resemble the existing customer base. Effective until the objective changes from deepening the base to expanding it.

Media costs kept climbing and Apple's privacy changes materially degraded the tracking signal that those lookalike mechanics depend on. The brand's targeting was getting more expensive and less precise at the same time, which is a difficult combination for any luxury brand trying to reach genuinely new customers.

SIMKHAI brought in Maison MRKT to navigate the shift. As a Shopify Plus partner, our teams identified Shopify Audiences as the mechanism most likely to solve the specific problem. This novel targeting strategy assembles high-intent buyer lists for use on digital advertising platforms, built from high quality purchase signals.

Maison MRKT built out multiple distinct audiences with beta access to Shopify Audiences, allowing campaign strategy to address separate new-customer segments with appropriate creative and messaging.

The measurement side mattered as much as the targeting side. Shopify Audiences reports on the actions customers actually take against the ads they were served, resulting in a direct attribution path at exactly the moment platform-side attribution had become least reliable. For a brand making budget decisions in a degraded signal environment, that visibility was the difference powering our optimization strategy.

"As the digital advertising landscape has evolved, it’s become increasingly difficult and expensive to find new customers at scale. Shopify’s unique position allows us to find valuable new customers through Audiences which has been very effective in helping us grow the SIMKHAI brand."

Brooke SteinHead of Digital, SIMKHAI

About
SIMKHAI, founded in 2010, makes ready-to-wear luxury apparel for the modern woman. Namesake founder and Creative Director Jonathan Simkhai first drew wide attention on winning the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2015, and the brand has since built a loyal customer base across international markets.

Building the playbook while Shopify Audiences was in beta.
Maison MRKT worked with Shopify Audiences during beta access, before the tool was broadly available. There was no established playbook to follow. Our teams built the approach from first principles and learned in-market. It also meant reaching high-intent buyers through a signal source that competing brands weren't yet drawing from. Any audience mechanism compresses in value as adoption grows and more advertisers bid against the same pool. Getting early access to Shopify Audiences bought a window where the signal was still uncrowded.

Campaigns built on Shopify Audiences returned 6.6x on ad spend, lifted conversion rate 84% and reduced cost per acquisition by 54%.

By the end of the test, 89% of SIMKHAI's new customer acquisition on Meta was attributed to Shopify Audiences. The channel replaced the lookalike-dependent engine described above.

When the platform-side signal degrades, the answer is a different source of truth. First-party purchase signals, owned by the commerce platform, filled in the gaps created by iOS 14.

Link to Shopify Case Study