For elite athletes, performance is everything as Bearhug, producers of bamboo charcoal joint supports know only too well. And young or old, new starters or professionals; they all benefit from ‘a hug’ when outpacing their competitors. Being their very best comes naturally to this company. So it is no surprise that a programme of digital fitness based on visual social media ads and optimal web performance, tweaked with a Shopify basket for online sales, meant they increased the ‘bear pack’ by 50% in five months. And with mobile payments set to be added to their kitbag in 2020, nothing is going to stop the Bear!
Alexander Davies, Chief Brand Builder
"Bearhug started in December 2016 and we’re based up in Caerphilly and we create bamboo-charcoal joint supports and muscle sleeves.
A typical customer for Bearhug will be someone with a sports injury or someone looking to recover from their training.
Bearhug’s online presence is vital to the business. We are predominantly an e-commerce business. Through our online presence, we use social media to promote our products and the brand and then we also take all of our orders through our own website.
Shopify has allowed us to develop the business with all the integrations it has available, especially Xero, which is our cloud-based accounting system. Mobile payments is something we could see ourselves using in the future and we’ve already been experimenting at a pop-up store in Cardiff using the Square platform.
We know who comes to the Bearhug website and buys our products through Google Analytics and also the Google My Business pages.
Our Director was made aware of Superfast Business Wales and suggested I go onto one of their SEO workshops. Following that, we had a 1:1 session with one of their advisers.
Following a review by the adviser, we moved to a new iteration of our website with a stronger integration with Shopify. From March to August 2019, our website sales grew by 50% just from our digital marketing activity. For our digital marketing, we use platforms like Facebook Advertising, Google Ads, and also pay per click. From that, we can see that our web visitors increased by up to 44%.
Bearhug is a visually-driven brand, so platforms like Facebook and Instagram are vital to our social media.
Bearhug has shown some real positive growth since launch and by being a digitally fit company, it looks set to continue."