SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS GROWTH | ARAN WOOLLEN MILLS

The newly-built Aran Woollen Mills Shopify Plus store launched in September of 2022, which perfectly coincided with the commencement of their scheduled Gross Demand Plan.

The Gross Demand Plan is a bespoke tool unique to Cake Agency that links ecommerce metrics to financial targets. It seeks to give ecommerce businesses a sustainable path to growth through 52 attainable steps, each representing 1 week in a full year. 

Aran Woollen Mills had set themselves the goal of making 7 figures on their website within their first year. However, they needed a roadmap that would navigate them through the twists and turns of how to get there. 

Gross Demand Plan

The Gross Demand Plan that we produced, created a path towards Aran Woollen Mills reaching their 7 figure goal. This initial plan laid out what major considerations they would need to make, including stock purchasing, customer modelling, and variable cost modelling, and the targets they would need to hit when it came to the major ecommerce metrics and cashflow.

As a part of this, Aran Woollen Mills needed insights into the marketing channels required for their launch, training on how to optimally utilise these channels, and transparency of the associated costs for each.

The full scope of the project was made up of two parts: A Gross Demand Plan for their first online quarter, which was from October through to December of 2022, and a second plan for the full calendar year that followed, with this 15-month trajectory allowing us to utilise real trends. Similarly, we’d be using the first three months as a testing period - as the company had no existing customer data to pull from - which would let us build a more accurate forecast for the following calendar year.

Data driven decisions like this require buy-in across the whole business; it’s no good if just one individual thinks they are a good idea. For AWM, the roadmap provided by the GDP was the final push that the directors needed to buy into the marketing plan. It made the allocation of budgets clear and helped to explain the ecommerce landscape.

This buy-in made it much easier for the business to internally justify expenses like Meta ad spend, which can seem like a lot of money for what you get if you aren’t experienced with them.During the first quarter, we saw significant interest for Aran Woollen Mills’ product offering in the aran sweater market, strong conversion rates, engaged traffic, and positive customer reactions. But crucially we got some vital data to refine the next gross demand plan.