3900% traffic growth, and a near 8-figure annual revenue in one year: how a brand new menstrual underwear company broke into the French market

About Repeat:

Back in 2020, three graphic design school graduates partnered to create Repeat — a France-based e-commerce brand that produces and sells menstrual underwear. Its key mission is to minimize the environmental impact by creating a multi-use sanitary product that’s accessible to all women.

Business Challenge: launch a new eCommerce brand in paid and organic channels

When the Repeat team launched its website in September 2019, they entered a red sea market. Even though menstrual underwear is quite an innovative product, there were around 15 other brands in France to compete against.

So the Repeat founders hit the ground running with all kinds of promotion they could master as a team of three who learned on the go:

   1. Paid media. This was a cost-efficient way to start promoting to a select and relevant audience.

Repeat needed to reach out to bloggers micro-influencers for product reviews, recommendations and links to their site. But how do they choose the right partners? 

They needed a way of finding relevant and effective domains for media placements that would save them time and money and bring sales.

“We were lean from the very beginning—we had a small team of three, limited budgets, but ambitious goals,” shares Anjali Govindassamy, co-founder of Repeat. 

Establishing partnerships with influencers is a skill that the Repeat team quickly developed. However, they soon realized that it was taking too much time and couldn’t bring immediate sales, so they turned to the next channel.

   2. Paid traffic. Besides the immediate effect, it was a necessary step to quickly test the team’s ideas around the brand—from finessing the positioning to polishing up the messaging. 

The team was about to invest in Facebook and Google shopping ads. The question was, which keywords should they target in search for the best ROI?  

   3. Organic traffic came up in the conversation early on. The Repeat team realized that paid channels couldn’t serve as a sustainable primary sales channel.

”When it came to advertising, we tried to do what’s absolutely necessary but we didn’t want to rely on paid media too much. Because we knew that we can only grow and develop our brand with a long-term view and strategy. Paid media alone won’t bring that”, adds Jonathan Haddad, another co-founder.

What Repeat needed was a more viable marketing strategy that wouldn’t stop once the ad dollars were cut. This is where they started building a more sustainable organic growth strategy for their e-commerce business.
 

Solution: establish a multi-channel marketing strategy

The Repeat team had to learn the ins and outs of digital marketing from the ground up. All three team members were savvy designers but had to build strong marketing knowledge by themselves. 

Despite this, Repeat managed to grow at an awe-inspiring pace and take up a substantial market share in France. This is what their ramp-up strategy looked like.

1. Influencer marketing as the initial brand awareness driver (and a source of backlinks)

Initially, Repeat’s marketing efforts began with influencer marketing. They didn’t go big or extremely ambitious from day one. Instead, they would reach out to micro-influencers—and successfully so:

• Finding influencers competitors already partner with

The team found an original use for Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool. They explored competitors’ backlink portfolios, making note of sites and bloggers that link back to the rivals’ sites.

The competitors had large lists of partners, but Repeat only focused on the ones that had solid metrics (all reflected within the tool)—domain authority and traffic potential.

This way, they were only reaching out to the most ‘valuable’ and worthy bloggers who could promote the brand and bring the biggest return.

• Preparing all the necessary materials

The Repeat team created a template they’d sent to all the potential partners, as well as a neat press kit that addressed most of the questions about an unusual product. 

Once the ice got broken and the communication started, they simply sent the product to influencers asking them for a product review and a backlink in return.
 

2. Affiliate marketing as an extra source of visibility

Of course, not all bloggers wanted to work with the brand without any strings attached. So the Repeat team also offered some affiliate programs where influencers could get a % from sales each time someone from their audience bought Repeat’s product.

3. Advertising for building the initial traction

As a consumer brand, Repeat also heavily invested in advertising. Apart from the testing perspective, the team was running ads to build up initial traffic for Repeat’s site.

Facebook was the key publishing platform. But they also used Semrush’s PLA Research tool to explore keywords that could help them launch effective ads within Google Shopping.  

The tool provides insights on competitors’ Google Shopping campaigns, such as:

• Which keywords they target
• Which creatives they use
• The positioning of their shopping ads
• Other domains competing for the same terms, etc.

This helped the Repeat team choose the most valuable keywords, write effective copy, and reach the top-3 positions in the ad grid for over a dozen queries.  

But as Florian Frier admitted, “Your ad account can get shut down, your influencer collaborations can stop, that’s why you need a source of sustainable long-term development. For us, that growth driver was customer- and SEO-friendly content”.

4. Sustainable growth through organic traffic

The Repeat team knew that advertising and influencer marketing alone wouldn’t cut it if they wanted to build a brand that lasts.

Up to mid-2021, however, organic growth was almost non-existent. They didn’t do too much to trigger it.

Only when Repeat took a thorough look at competitors’ marketing strategy did they realize that SEO serves as the backbone of their online success. The team got the insights through the Semrush Domain Overview tool that revealed the key channels that drive traffic to the competition.

That’s when the real SEO work started. And thanks to the process revealed below, Repeat managed to bring its organic traffic share up to 30%.

• Eliminating any site issues

Repeat doesn’t have a super large website so their site maintenance is pretty straightforward. 

Even then, the team made sure to run regular site health checks with the help of the Semrush Site Audit tool, taking quick action whenever they noticed an error, such as broken internal links, duplicate content, low page load speed, and others.

This ensured that their site was well crawled and ready for high rankings on Google.

• Focusing on the low-hanging keywords

The initial take on Repeat’s keyword strategy was to find niche keywords that reflected user intent, are fairly easy to rank for, and—if possible—have higher search volume. 

They didn’t target search terms that had a very high number of monthly searches and unclear/general intent. Not at the very beginning.

Semrush’s Keyword Overview and Keyword Magic tools had all the intel and metrics needed to find these keywords. 

As the site kept growing its authority (mainly thanks to acquired backlinks), the team included more challenging keywords.

But keyword strategy alone wasn't enough to bring traffic and, what’s more important, actual paying customers. What they needed was great content that’d appeal to both customers and search engines.

• Creating content that ranks 

On top of site authority, Repeat needed to establish itself as an expert in the field of female health, eco-consciousness, and care. Content was the only way to do that.

In their articles, they started addressing customers' questions around the product as well as including the target keywords discovered earlier.

The team put together content briefs for external writers and ran quality checks once the article was ready.

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant tool came as the perfect solution for this. It didn’t just check the text for reader- and SEO-friendliness but also gave actionable improvement suggestions to enhance the copy on the go.

By May 2022, Repeat published 10 blog posts that serve as a substantial traffic magnet—three of them are within the top 3 positions in Google’s SERP, bringing thousands of visitors a month. 

Results: near 8-figure revenue in a year

Repeat’s targeted organic growth strategy started in mid-2021. Together with advertising and influencer marketing the company achieved impressive results:

From December 2020 to June 2022, Repeat’s traffic grew by 3900%, reaching tens of thousands of monthly visitors.

Since January 2022, the 10 articles published on Repeat’s site were responsible for at least a 45% increase in organic traffic.

In just one year, Repeat’s annual revenue spiked by around 300%, reaching almost 8 figures.

Between the launch in 2020 and mid-2022, Repeat managed to win a substantial market share in France, with ambitious plans to expand to other European countries in the nearest future.