Mabina Spa: This Jewelry Company Bartered Its Own Wares in Exchange for Media

 

Campaign Summary

With the help of agency partner Havas Media, Mabina Spa offloaded products from a defunct brand to finance a media plan.

Strategy

Objective

Havas Market had three main objectives with this effort:

  • Help Mabina Spa sell its stock.
  • Find the right sales channels to sell entire quantities of jewels in the most tracked/controlled way to avoid overlaps with Mabina Spa's normal distribution channels.
  • Build the most suitable media campaign for Mabina Spa and reach the right audience for it.

Context

Mabina Spa is an Italian jewelry company based in Milan. Founded in 1999 by a family of jewelers with a three-generation legacy, it specializes in the design, production, and marketing of proprietary brands.

The company's brands include Kidult, Mabina Gioielli, 2Jewels, and WHYNOW Jewels.

Mabina Spa has established itself as a prominent player in the industry, offering a diverse range of jewelry options to cater to different consumer preferences.

In 2022, Mabina Spa made the strategic decision to discontinue the production and commercialization of its brand 2Jewels. Concurrently, the company needed to find the budget to promote another one of its brands with a proper media plan.

Target Audience

The target audience for this effort was women with a propensity to purchase jewelry in the next 12 months.

Havas Market worked with three personas that were translated into three different buying attitudes:

  • Rational
  • Impulsive
  • Value-driven

Creative and Media Strategy

Havas Market's creative and media strategy worked together to help Mabina Spa sell its jewelry stock and allocate the proceeds toward a corresponding media plan of equal value.

Havas Market tailored its communications to special occasions, such as Christmas and Valentine's Day, to reach the audience when they were in the right mindset.

Execution/Use of Media

Obviously, the budget for a media plan does not magically grow on trees; but what was not that evident was that Havas Market did not actually need money to solve its client's problem.

Bartering proved to be the smart choice, enabling Havas Market to assist Mabina Spa in de-stocking its 2Jewels inventory while simultaneously providing them with a media plan for its other brand.

Havas Market's plan unfolded in several phases, as it:

  • Evaluated the client's retail stock worth €1.5 million
  • Was invoiced by the client for the entire stock. (According to the bartering rules, Havas Market was then committed to delivering a media plan for Mabina Spa of equal value to the invoiced stock, but with an internal cost much lower than the invoiced price.)
  • Created and managed the physical logistics of selling the jewels, from stock reception at its warehouse, to the inbound and inventory, to the stock marshaling
  • Defined the right B2B and B2C channels and partners to sell the products.

Havas Market selected Amazon, which offered full-service management, Privalia and Veepee for flash sales, and private e-commerce that was reserved only for its agency employees.

Business Impact

Havas Market's approach demonstrated innovation by addressing Mabina Spa's non-media problem of overstocking a declining brand and transforming it into a mutually beneficial opportunity involving both media and non-media solutions. Havas Market successfully solved the destocking problem while implementing a new media campaign for the client without utilizing their media budget, but instead by leveraging their own stock.

More specifically, Havas Market sold the entire stock at an average margin of 65 percent on the products.


Categories: | Industries: | Objectives: Integrated Ecommerce Innovation | Awards: X Global Finalist