Samsonite bought an 85% stake in BÉIS, the travel brand founded by Shay Mitchell. The announced price was ~$178.5M, putting the business at roughly ~$210M in enterprise value. (Deal announcement, closing announcement)
I wanted to break down how they get people to buy.
There’s a lot that goes into building a business worth that much, and we’re not going to reverse-engineer all of it from a few ads and product pages.
But, BÉIS has some super straightforward ways of showing why its products are useful, then giving you enough detail to decide whether you actually need one.
Here are three ad formats I’d borrow, plus one landing-page test I’d run.
First, what are they selling?
BÉIS sells luggage, weekenders, backpacks, totes, diaper bags, and smaller travel accessories. Basically, bags for getting your stuff from one place to another, with different products depending on how much stuff and where you’re going.
For some price context, the US site currently lists the Weekender in Black at $118, the Commuter Tote in Black at $138, and the Carry-On Roller in Black at $268.
The useful part for us is how many of the features come with an obvious demonstration. You can show the Weekender’s separate bottom compartment keeping shoes away from clothes. You can show a bag sliding onto a suitcase handle. You can show what fits inside.
That gives the creative team a pretty good place to start.
The ads make it easy to get the point
When I’m trying to get a feel for “what’s working” for a brand, I use a combo of:
What’s repeating? (The concept or format is probably ripping, so they run lots of iterations of it)
How long has it been live? (Most of the time if a brand has an ad running for 30+ days, it passed their “testing phase”)
So let’s chop up a few of their recurring formats.
Bold Callout Statics
Static ads are the cheapest and fastest way to get messaging tests off, and this seems like a core pillar of BÉIS’s creative strategy.
What they’re doing well here is testing out copy that answers “Why?”, and then doubling down on the angles that (I’m assuming) sell well.
“Friction” or “Lack of Space” seems like a common enemy they attack over and over, and the copy is almost always overlaid on HQ product shots which keeps their elevated vibe present.
Not shown in these examples are very similar formats for:
Copy focused on New Releases
More “Organic shots” (think the examples I showed, but shot via iPhone)
“Model Shots” etc.
The basic format is simple: an organic or polished product shot, plus a bold headline giving you a reason to buy.
I always recommend testing new messaging with statics first. What works there gets ‘graduated’ into video, which we’ll break down next.
Packing Videos
They have sooo many versions of this live with different products and SKUs, and I’d assume whenever they have a new product they rinse and repeat this. (If not, they should!)
For a brand like BÉIS, people wanna see how the bags look and how they actually work at the end of the day.
BÉIS scales this out as a format with a mix of “POV” like the example, creators showing themselves packing and bringing a bag along with them, and more.
Love this as a pillar for them, and it leads right into the next one.
Creator Content
Three examples here but they have a TON of different formats, skip down to my breakdown and then check them out!
BÉIS has a mix of the packing videos we chatted about, and a TON of other creator videos that are, again, just showing off products in everyday-use.
The reason I love this is (A) because people want to see people, at the end of the day, and (B) it’s becoming a standard recommendation at this point to shoot for at least 30% of Meta Ad Spend on Partnership Ads, but really the more the merrier.
“Partnership Ads” means:
Running ads from creators’ pages rather than from @BÉIS for example.
I’m encouraging most of my clients to get started on Trybe, a platform for sourcing creator content, so they have a steady flow of videos to test.
BÉIS is building out a full suite of:
Statics that give you a reason to buy.
Packing videos that show what the bag actually does.
Creators showing how they use it, so you can picture using it too.
Okay, where are they sending all the people that click their ads?
As a whole, collection pages dominate the landing-page list I looked at.
For most brands with a lot of colors, or SKUs, that’s usually the place to start.
Looking at ad count it’s roughly:
Travel Bundles (15-20% discounts on bundles of multiple bags or suitcases)
Travel Bags and Backpacks (Non-luggage bags)
Luggage & Packing Cube Sets (Luggage-specific products)
Super simple strategy, but there’s one nuance I’d wanna test as soon as I got in their account.
Some single-product-focused ads still send people to a collection page. Those are the ones I’d test against the product page.
Start ads on the pages that already perform well in your account.
If you find a winning ad creative, duplicate it and run it to the main product’s product page.
If a creator spends the whole ad showing one bag, I’d test sending people straight to that bag instead of asking them to find it in a collection.
What I’d take back to my own account
The thing I like most about these examples is how little translation the customer has to do. You see a bag packed, organized, or under an airplane seat, and you can picture using it yourself.
You can take one product this week, find three questions customers ask about it, and brief three ads that answer those questions visually.
That’s where I’d start. Before asking the team for another batch of ads, I’d want to know which part of the “why you should buy” we still haven’t made clear.
When something works, make more versions of it and show your creators what worked. Give them something useful to build on so they can make more rippers for the account.
Super simple playbook here, but can say from experience with similar brands that this stuff works.
Peace and Love,
Travis
Thanks for reading, I’ll likely break down a CPG brand next, cause they are a wholeee different ballgame. Subscribe to get that fresh off the press.