About Intermetrics
Intermetrics was created by Intersell Ventures, a global consumer products distributor founded in 2007 with offices in the US, Hong Kong, and Madrid, which distributes consumer products to more than 80 countries worldwide.
In 2020, Intersell expanded into the Direct to Consumer space and began launching its own products, leveraging its international distribution, full-service TV production facility, and knowledge of direct response marketing and digital consumer engagement.
It was a total disaster. And this is where the Intermetrics story begins.
Bad data = big problems.
Intersell's first hit product, Skinny Stacks, saw almost immediate success. The $19.99 food storage tray, advertised nationally on TV and through Facebook ads, seemed like a homerun. The sales were pouring in, Walmart and other retailers were interested in putting it on the shelf, our Amazon sales were stellar, and our TV campaign was driving conversion rates as high as 12%.
Every web analytics tool we used to track our performance, from Facebook Campaign Manager to Google Analytics to Amazon and Shopify's internal reports, showed we were profitable. Over the next several weeks, we increased our marketing spend and brought in more inventory. We kept scaling, and the sales kept coming.
That is, until the first quarterly accounting review, when our CFO asked why the marketing team was losing so much money.
Web Dudes: "Losing money? We're making a $4 profit per order."
Accounting: "You're losing $2 per order."
The marketing team double and triple checked their numbers. They were sure they were profitable. Every decision to scale up was based on data. Except they didn't have all the data.
Returns. Chargebacks. The cost of the trucks that take the containers from the port to the warehouse. Receiving fees. Pick & pack fees. Transaction fees. Storage charges. Residential fulfillment and fuel surcharges. None of that was in there.
Accounting was right. Because the web team's analytical tools didn't have all of the data, what looked like a profit was actually a loss. As they scaled up the campaign, the losses scaled with it. And it wasn't just Skinny Stacks; we were running a dozen product campaigns, and were making "data-driven decisions" without all of the data on all of them.
A solution was born.
Our CTO took the lead and came up with a solution to centralize our data. It would connect to the API's of all of the places we're selling, all of the places we're spending marketing dollars, and the warehouse. The accounting team would put in all of the product and logistics costs, and once we had all of that data in one place, we could break that out by campaign and see where we're winning and losing.
For the next two years, we used this platform exclusively to monitor and manage our own product campaigns. We added features as we thought of them, and made constant updates to improve accuracy. We identified and dropped the under-performing products and leaned into the performers. In doing so, we increased our profits while lowering our gross revenue.
A new vertical.
In 2023, Intersell expanded again, entering into the marketing management space using the insights provided by our platform to grow their profitability, and our platform - now called Intermetrics ("Intersell" + "metrics". Get it?) - became a stand-alone business unit.
That's our story. If you like what Intermetrics did for our brands and want to do it for yours, contact us.