A Parachute (Made of Sheets!) Has Landed

Five years ago, Parachute, a high-quality bed sheets retailer, made a name for itself by selling its products exclusively online. It was direct-to-consumer, boasting of efficiency by cutting out middlemen. Now, Parachute has landed and staked itself to the ground.

Parachute’s products have grown from bed sheets to towels, mattresses, bathrobes, and more. “Bedding was a vehicle to gain customer trust, but it was never the end goal,” said Parachute CMO Luke Droulez. “We want to be a premium home brand.” To do that, they had to make a bold move: Enter the “brick & mortar” experiment. It may sound backwards today, but data shows that stores legitimize brands in the minds of shoppers. Parachute’s experiment didn’t end there though. They knew the best marketing was word of mouth, but it’s been hard to measure. Not anymore. Now, there is social media.

Parachute invested in podcasts, TV, and out-of-home campaigns. They also bought ads on Facebook and Instagram (Instagram Stories) to follow its word of mouth (Ex: #myparachutehome, a thread about Parachute product discussion). By using this medium’s data, Parachute saw how consumers viewed their products. So far, it has worked. So much so, Parachute was having difficulty keeping track of all its data-providing keywords! As a result, it branched out from its in-house team and gave its search-engine marketing to an outside agency to assist in tracking.

“Instead of buying and selling commodity derivative, you’re buying and selling people’s attention spans,” said Droulez to AdExchanger. Parachute is not the first online retailer to test brick & mortar; however, their social media experiment may be distinctive. “Best practices can lead you to be better,” said Droulez. “[But] the way to win is to be different.”