Nuanced Media

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketplace manager for a seat covers company, handling sales through channels like Amazon and eBay.

What challenge were you trying to address with Nuanced Media?

We had tons of listings that weren’t optimized or finished. Our biggest goal was to condense our listings and optimize them for both promotions and keywords. The end goal was to boost more sales.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They improved our existing presence in the marketplace. Our product is unique in that each item is custom, made-to-order. The listing now provides all the necessary information to the customer upfront. Before, we were required to go back and forth with the customer to ensure they had all the necessary information to complete a purchase. To correct that, they managed content, keyword research, and presented a new store management system for us. Additionally, they set a monthly budget for our returns. 

At this point, they’ve cleaned up our listings. They’re currently continuing to optimize and run advertising campaigns.

What is the team composition?

We work with two people, who function as our account managers. The owner of the company is also available to us if needed. 

How did you come to work with Nuanced Media?

We had too many individual listings on Amazon, so we started looking for a local third-party partner. They’re relatively local to us and showed up in our Google searches. When they came to meet us, our goals aligned. 

After our meeting, they drafted a list of things that they thought could be improved in our listings. We had the same goals, and they showed a ton of empathy for our situation. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in September 2019, and our work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The returns on our monthly promotions are impressive. They made huge improvements to our online storefront, integrating a new system that lets me manage listings more easily. It was also helpful to have them walk us through the new processes.   

Before our engagement with them, we were selling about 200 units of a certain product each month. Since we passed responsibilities over to them, they provided us with great content and analysis on which markets to actively target. From that point on, we’ve averaged over 900 units of the same product per month in sales. The product is the same, but they were able to find and capitalize on the opportunity.  

How did Nuanced Media perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re available to us whenever we need support and have saved us a lot of money. We were impressed with their willingness to hold our hands throughout the process. They were in contact through Basecamp, which allowed for a super organized process. We assign tasks and communicate on the platform. There was full transparency— our weekly meeting notes were even uploaded. The platform was very easy to use as well. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They provide excellent customer service, which means a lot. Many people could’ve optimized our listings, but they were by far the most customer-centric. They were willing to answer all of our questions and treated us well throughout the development. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t of anything. It would be great to have them on staff full time.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing coordinator at Crystal Impressions.

What challenge were you trying to address with Nuanced Media?

We were trying to get our products selling on Amazon.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We touched base with Nuanced Media last year. After receiving information on what they could provide, we started working with them. The engagement began with strictly Amazon. We strategized product launches and determined product groups for Amazon pages. We started from scratch when it came to crafting content for the pages.

What is the team composition?

In the beginning, we worked with Steven (COO). After we chose to engage with them, we started working with a project management team. Behind the scenes, they have a larger group that helps contribute content specific to our project. They also someone that assists with our Amazon listings.

How did you come to work with Nuanced Media?

We found Nuanced Media on Google. We had a lot of back-and-forth conversations in the beginning. Those conversations made me realize that they were interested in finding partners, not just customers. They also seemed to enjoy helping businesses grow. That desire has been genuine and authentic. Once we saw that, we scaled up our engagement with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $50,000–$100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our actual work with them started in October 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

It’s been a wonderful success, and we’re extremely happy. We started selling products in the first week of March. We’ve sold about 50,000 in revenue product sales, which we considered a success. It’s more than we anticipated. We’re now starting to work with e-commerce on our own website.

How did Nuanced Media perform from a project management standpoint?

Each week, we meet with two members of their team, Cody (Senior Strategist) and Haelim (Account Executive), that keep us updated. We’ve met on Zoom and had phone calls. They also have Basecamp, which we do a ton of communicating on. We can set up projects and ask questions. We couldn’t do what we’ve done without that system.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their team is very candid. They under promise and overdeliver. They’ve made a space for honesty. They’ve proven we can trust them over time.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they’re the best marketing vendor I’ve worked with.

Please describe your organization.

TM International is in the business of making temporary tattoos, both custom and stock ones, which are printed out and sold to retail customers. Custom tattoos can be used for anything, ranging from birthday parties to business promotional products.

What is your position?

I am the Vice President of custom orders.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Nuanced Media?

We had an old legacy site which was not modifiable at all.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We operate a number of websites. The ones with which Nuanced Media has been involved are called tattoosales.com and temporarytattoos.com. They have provided website development and rebranding services to our company.

They gave us suggestions for salvaging search engine optimization as much as we could in the beginning, given our site limitations. We then started going down the path of creating a new site with the support of Nuanced Media.

We've had a complete overhaul of our internal IT department, and I came to be in charge of developing a new site. I had to make decisions in terms of the platform which the site would use, and I also knew that we needed to have a content delivery network in place in order to improve website speed, especially in foreign countries. I didn't know where to start, but Nuanced Media pointed me towards the right direction and put me in touch with appropriate companies with which they worked in the past. This made a big difference in getting the site completed quickly. We ultimately chose Magento as our platform.

How did you come to work with Nuanced Media?

We were having trouble with one of their competitors, not fully seeing eye-to-eye. Our CEO met one of Nuanced Media’s founders at a networking event. He came in to talk to us, and we hit it off. A lot of their offerings were needs which we had at the time, so Nuanced Media was at the right place at the right time. We've been very happy with them since.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total development cost was between $10,000-50,000. We worked on a shoestring budget for this development. The money spent with Nuanced Media provided a significant return on investment, given some of their suggestions. For example, we run a community version of Magento, which is free.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with Nuanced Media since November 2015. The new page launched earlier this month, March 2016.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Most notably for me is the fact that we were able to rebrand our company and launch the website. The goal was to adopt a stable, fast, and customizable e-commerce platform. I think we've met all of those goals.

One of our goals was also to increase the loading speed of our site, especially internationally. We speed-tested tattoosales.com from Melbourne, Australia. Our average load time was about 9.67 seconds. We've cut this down to 3.84 seconds. We're still working on this, but it's important to note that we've cut down load time by two thirds. This was very important for me because I sell to 84 countries. Even though we host the site in Tucson, Arizona, we still need to appear international and our site needs to load quickly, regardless of country.

Another strong suggestion from Nuanced Media was that we move to the cloud. We've started to use Rackspace for hosting and have a content delivery network offered by CloudFlare, through which we're able to cache our page worldwide. This makes our site a lot faster and easier to use. A 9.67 second load time for Sydney was not acceptable to our customers, and we had received complaints about this. We're still new to the change and are still making site modifications, but when we're finished with this, I'm sure we'll be able to improve the site even more.

How did Nuanced Media perform from a project management standpoint?

I could not be happier with their team. We've gone through some tough times prior to starting our work with them. Internal restructuring derailed our normal operations, but Nuanced Media was able to sit down with us, allowing me to pivot my strategy and come up with an entirely new solution and quickly execute it. I'm proud of what we've achieved and have them to thank for the success.

What distinguishes Nuanced Media from other providers?

Website launches never go smoothly. We had gotten in a bit of a pinch in ours, while testing extensively right before launch. We found a critical problem which had to do with rounding in our system. It was missed for a lot of reasons prior to this point and only discovered right before launch. It would have been quite problematic, billing customers for a certain price and charging a difference of a penny or two because of a rounding calculation. Fixing it required Nuanced Media's help from a coding perspective. I was on the phone with one of their coders for a couple of nights prior to launch. Not every vendor would stay with their client to such a degree, at crazy hours and during weekends. Nuanced Media went above and beyond in order to ensure I met my launch date. There is no better advertisement for their services than this.

Is there anything Nuanced Media could have improved or done differently?

We came to a point of doing a lot of our meetings virtually. I personally prefer in-person conversations. We did try to get together weekly, take a step back, and evaluate how everything was going. There were definitely times when conference calls were appropriate, as well as times when in-person meetings were best. I always asked them to come to our place or vice versa.