Vivre: The joy of changing
By being unafraid to reinvent her approach, Monica helped thousands to reinvent their homes during the pandemic.
The concept behind home furnishings company Vivre was ‘The Joy of Living.’
Started by CEO Monica Cadogan back in 2012, that founding concept seems perhaps more relevant than ever post-pandemic, as many will have spent this period learning how to juggle home-life, work-life and everything in between, all within one confined space.
Monica started the company with two good friends who shared her passion for homewares; Călin Fusu and Andras Nagy Vajda.
“Our early partnerships were with suppliers from Portugal and Germany. The company expanded quickly, and by the end of 2018, we were active in 9 markets across Central and Eastern Europe: Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Greece.”
A modest handful of the early employees began using Google’s Find My Audience tool to look into where their online audience were coming from, learn about their online behaviours, and start to tailor online advertising and product options to suit them better. It sparked a trend of iteration and reinvention.
“We were continually working on improving things: we still have teams dedicated to generating new ideas and options”.
Monica explains: “When the pandemic broke, and people started to adapt to their new way of life and redecorate their home workspaces, we managed to channel customer attention with targeted offer advertising.” The team studied the Google Analytics data closely, and monitored the evolution of their channels, to understand what people needed, and the marketing strategy was reshaped accordingly.
“The results were remarkable, as was the expansion of our client base” says Monica.
In fact, a number of digital tools helped the team to pivot and streamline their efforts.
When advertising spaces were overcrowded, on Black Friday for instance, Vivre used YouTube Select to test their target audience's interest levels, find out what was working well, what wasn’t, and adapt.
Thanks to this spirit of continuous evolution and reincarnation, the business has not only been able to adapt during the pandemic, but has scaled their offering up to 6.3 millions orders over the last 9 years. Today, Vivre is one the largest home & decoration online retailers in their region, with more than 750,000 products.
“We are now starting to trial search filters that will direct our clients faster to the products they are looking for, shortening their search time. We also want to improve the Vivre app, to offer inspirational ideas for the home on a daily basis.”
Perhaps it’s that spirit of reinvention that we tap into when redecorating our homes, spilling over into the way Monica runs her business. Whatever it is, it seems to be working. And thousands of customers' homes have been a little nicer for it.