Latest / Content Marketing with Fexingo: Blogs, Videos, and Long-Form Content That Converts / How Gift Wrap Generated 60 Percent Repeat Orders for a DTC Brand
Transcript
- Lucas: About eighteen months ago, a small candle brand called Wick & Ember had a problem that a lot of DTC businesses know well. Their Facebook ads were pulling in new customers at a solid cost per acquisition — around 18 dollars — but the retention was terrible. Something like 8 percent of first-time buyers ever came back. Luna: That's brutal. So they're paying to acquire customers who basically use them once and disappear. What changed? Lucas: They tried the usual stuff. Email sequence, retargeting, a loyalty program. None of it moved the needle much. Then the marketing lead — a woman named Jenna Okonkwo — had an idea that sounded almost too simple. She said, 'What if we make the first purchase feel like a gift — even if it's for yourself?' Luna: So like, putting the candle in a gift box with a ribbon? Lucas: Exactly. But they didn't just change the packaging. They created a blog post titled 'The Five-Minute Gift Wrap That Makes Any Candle Feel Like a Present'. It was a photo and text guide showing three wrapping styles using their branded tissue paper, a wax seal, and a handwritten tag. The post went live on their site with zero ad spend. Luna: Zero? So they just published it and hoped? Lucas: They did a tiny bit of SEO groundwork — keyword research around 'gift wrap candle' and 'candle gift idea' — but mostly they optimised for Pinterest. The post had vertical images with text overlays, and Jenna pinned them to a board called 'Candle Gifting'. That turned out to be the real engine. Luna: Pinterest is still underrated for DTC. I remember HubSpot data from a couple years ago showing the average order value from Pinterest was like 30 percent higher than from Instagram. Lucas: Yeah, and that holds. In the first month, the blog post drove 12,000 organic visits. But here's the part that made Jenna do a double-take. Of those visitors, 23 percent clicked through to the product page and added the 'gift-wrap upgrade' — which was a $2.99 add-on. And that add-on became a gateway. Luna: Because if you're buying a candle as a gift, you're probably not the recipient. So the next step is... the recipient might want to buy one for themselves or for someone else. Lucas: Right. The post included a subtle call to action at the bottom: 'Send one to a friend — we'll include a gift note for free.' That turned the one-time gift buyer into a referral source. But the real retention win was among customers who bought the gift-wrap upgrade for themselves. Luna: Wait — for themselves? So they're paying an extra $2.99 to have their own candle gift-wrapped? Lucas: Yes. And that's where the psychology gets interesting. Jenna told me the unboxing experience was deliberately designed. The candle came in a box with a magnetic closure, wrapped in tissue, with a wax seal. Customers started posting unboxing videos on TikTok and Instagram organically — no incentive. The brand's repeat purchase rate among those self-gift-wrap buyers hit 60 percent within six months. Luna: Sixty percent is insane. Most DTC brands would kill for 20. So the content piece — the blog post — was basically the front door to a behaviour loop: you read the guide, you buy the upgrade, you have a beautiful unboxing, you post about it, and then you want to experience that again. Lucas: That's exactly the loop. And they doubled down. Jenna's team repurposed the blog post into a three-email sequence for new subscribers. The first email was the guide. The second email featured customer photos of their wrapped candles. The third offered a discount code on a two-candle bundle — which, of course, came gift-wrapped. Luna: That sequence alone must have pulled in some numbers. Lucas: Over the next quarter, the email sequence drove 4,000 repeat purchasers — people who bought once, got the sequence, then bought again. Most of them bought the gift-wrap upgrade again. The whole program cost them essentially zero dollars beyond the time to write the post and the cost of the tissue paper and wax. Their ad spend stayed flat, but lifetime value jumped from 32 dollars to 78 dollars per customer. Luna: So the content asset was a blog post, but the real product was the experience. That's a powerful distinction. A lot of marketers think of content as a lead generation tool — get the click, get the sale. But here, the content engineered a physical touchpoint that created an emotional memory. Lucas: And the data supports that. Jenna showed me a survey they sent to repeat buyers. The top reason given for coming back wasn't the candle quality — which was good — it was 'the feeling of unwrapping it'. That's a direct line from a blog post to a tactile emotion. Luna: Did they try scaling it to other products? Like, a gift-wrap version for their room spray or diffuser? Lucas: They did. They created a similar post for a 'spa gift set' — again, with the wrap guide. It didn't perform as well. The key was the candle itself. Candles are inherently gift-like, and the ritual of lighting one felt connected to the unwrapping ritual. The spray didn't have that same sensory arc. Luna: So the lesson is: the content needs to match the product's emotional affordance. You can't just slap a gift wrap on anything and expect the same loop. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why I think this case is so instructive. It's not about a fancy content format — it's about finding the single point where content, product, and human behaviour intersect. For Wick & Ember, that point was the five-minute gift wrap. Luna: It reminds me of something I read about the 'endowment effect' — people value things more if they've invested even a tiny bit of effort or ritual into them. By gift-wrapping their own purchase, they're essentially performing a small ritual that makes the candle feel more valuable. Lucas: And then they share it. That's the flywheel. Jenna told me that the unboxing posts on TikTok generated about 200,000 organic views in three months — all from actual customers, not influencers. That's earned media with zero production cost. Luna: Okay, so what's the one takeaway for a marketer listening who doesn't sell candles? How do you find your version of the gift wrap? Lucas: I think you look for the moment in your customer's journey where a small ritual can create disproportionate delight. For a SaaS product, maybe it's the onboarding email that includes a personalized video. For a coffee subscription, maybe it's a hand-written note in the first box. The content piece that teaches or showcases that ritual becomes the magnet. Luna: So start with the behaviour you want to create, then build the content around it. Don't start with 'we need a blog post' and then try to push people somewhere. Lucas: Right. The blog post was almost incidental — it was the instruction manual for the behaviour. And that behaviour created a habit. Wick & Ember's repeat purchase rate for the gift-wrap cohort is now at 60 percent, while their standard cohort is still around 12 percent. The content changed the business. Luna: And it cost them basically nothing to start. That's the part I love. You don't need a big production budget. You just need to think about what your customer does with the product after they open the box. Lucas: Exactly. And on that note — if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it makes a real difference for the production side — keeps us able to do deep dives like this one without ads. Lucas: So, back to Wick & Ember — one other detail I want to mention. After the blog post took off, they created a short video version. Just 90 seconds, shot on an iPhone, showing the same three wrap techniques set to lo-fi music. They posted it on YouTube and embedded it in the blog. That video now has 80,000 views and is the second-highest-converting page on their site. Luna: And I'm guessing they also repurposed it as a YouTube Short and a TikTok, right? Lucas: They did. The TikTok version — 15 seconds, just the fastest wrap — got 1.2 million views. Jenna told me that the week that TikTok went up, their gift-wrap add-on attach rate hit 41 percent. That's nearly half of all orders adding a $2.99 item that costs them about 12 cents to execute. Luna: So the video expanded the reach, but the blog post was the anchor. The long-form content gave the depth that made the video credible. Lucas: Yeah, and the blog post ranks for about 40 different long-tail keywords now. It's a classic content hub. The video sits on the page, the email sequence links to it, Pinterest pins point to it. It's the nucleus of their entire retention strategy. Luna: I think the part I'll remember is that it wasn't about the gift wrap. It was about giving customers a way to participate in the brand story. The gift wrap was just the prop. Lucas: Right. The real content was the ritual. And the blog post was the script for that ritual. That's a model that can work for almost any product — if you're willing to look at what your customers actually do after they buy.