Solo Stove Fires Up Digital Experiences for Massive Engagement

ABOUT

From Kickstarter to Consumer Favorite

Growing from a 2011 Kickstarter campaign to a $2 billion IPO valuation in 2021, today Solo Brands is the undisputed leader in smoke-free backyard fire pits and camping stoves. With 2023 net sales of $494.8 million, the company is known for popular brands like Solo Stove and acquisitions of Chubbies, Oru Kayak, and Isle. Most recently the company reaped significant mindshare and street credibility by partnering with rapper and entrepreneur Snoop Dogg. Solo Stove’s award-winning “Snoop Goes Smokeless” campaign led to increases of 500% in organic search, 195% on Amazon, and 167% on Google search, and 22% reduced customer acquisition costs. It now aims to build the next generation of digitally connected commerce to drive the best customer experience on the internet: a new website with Cloudinary Assets — our intelligent DAM — as its heart.

THE CHALLENGE

The Old DAM Bursts

In November, behind closed doors, Solo Stove’s creatives were daring to dream big: could Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. — aka Snoop Dogg — with 84.5 million Instagram followers be persuaded to advertise the brand?

Despite coming up with a brilliant creative concept involving Snoop “going smokeless,” there was a major roadblock. According to Solo Stove’s senior cinematographer, studio photographer, and digital asset manager, there was no way its current DAM would be able to cope with the kind of visitor tsunami an edgy campaign like this would attract.

Fortunately, timing was on Solo Stove’s side. Its digital team was already in the midst of a major enterprise transformation and replatforming program to Salesforce Commerce Cloud when the momentum to launch this campaign was building. Also, the company was approaching the end of its contract with its incumbent DAM. It was the ideal time to look at modernizing its DAM as part of the transformation.

The creative team explains the urgency: “Our digital asset manager was uploading 50 to 100 to 150 assets at a time during the busy holiday period. The system would start uploading — and then it would just stop.” That’s when I thought, “We can’t keep working like this.”

“So, a significant amount of my workflow was committed to ensuring that the DAM was working and everything was organized, so I need it to work, and work efficiently. We needed a new DAM.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

‘A Perfect Opportunity to Improve the DAM’

The creative team led the search for a new DAM, taking Cohen’s recommendation to evaluate Cloudinary against other solid competitors. After weighing the needs of the creative, e-commerce, and digital teams, Cloudinary Assets was selected as the best choice to boost web performance and UX, including for those high-impact creative campaigns. By powering an immersive, aspirational web experience Cloudinary would not only make Solo Stove’s products come alive on screen, but also drive conversions.

Crucially, the creative team was enthusiastic about Cloudinary’s potential to have a major positive impact on the operational efficiency of its entire team, optimizing images and video at scale and serving as a single source of truth for all photo and video.

What sealed the deal, however, was the seamless way Cloudinary natively integrated with fellow composable solution, Contentstack’s, headless content management system — another key component in Solo Stove’s new tech stack.

Says Cohen, “We had a core group of technology partners — including Contentstack — that we wanted to carry forward into our new environment. And as content will be a lot heavier on the new site, we also wanted to make sure that we had the best DAM behind that content — something with a lot more modularity to it and that has more room for us to explain, educate, and differentiate.”

Cohen also put a high value on Cloudinary’s documentation: “You often see a lot of weakness with tech providers’ documentation, but Cloudinary’s is fire — it’s awesome! We love that it allows us to self-service and creates efficiencies all around.”

“All of these factors combined gave us the perfect opportunity to improve the DAM.”

THE RESULTS

Match Fit for Heavyweight Campaigns

Although Cloudinary has been “fuel” for the Solo Stove brand for a relatively short time, it has more than proven its worth. Teams can now access all visual media directly from within Contentstack to create marketing experiences and from within Salesforce Commerce Cloud to create commerce experiences. The new site will hit the streets soon.

The key test? The campaign with Snoop attracted a whopping 19 billion impressions — with no Solo Stove site downtime.

Cohen also estimates that Cloudinary is saving Solo Stove’s creative team 30-40% in the visual media workflow by improving tasks like bulk uploading and mass file replacement. Cloudinary’s q_auto and f_auto transformations are heavily used to automatically optimize image quality and format and g_auto will soon be used for content-aware image cropping.

“Cloudinary is also leading to faster image and video load times, every second of which contributes to higher conversion rates, a closely tracked KPI,” adds Cohen.

What might have happened if Solo Stove had launched its world-famous “Snoop Goes Smokeless” campaign on an outdated technology platform?

Cohen’s assessment is stark: “If we hadn’t been on a genuinely enterprise, scalable, and trustworthy DAM with the smooth kind of workflow that we have right now, our DTC business might have struggled to handle the demand.”