Latest / Brand Storytelling with Fexingo: Narrative, Mission, and Stories That Sell / How a Single Email Grew a Brand Thousands of Percent
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this watch brand called MVMT — M-V-M-T — that launched in 2015 with basically no money. Founders were two college dropouts, Jake Kassan and Kramer LaPlante. They had a prototype, a Shopify store, and a very specific theory about how to sell a $95 watch that looked like a $500 watch. Luna: I remember those ads. They were everywhere on Instagram for a while. Minimalist design, 'get the look without the markup.' Lucas: Exactly. The pitch was: 'Luxury watches are overpriced because of retail markups. We sell direct to you.' That positioning was not new — Warby Parker did it for glasses. But MVMT applied it to a category where brand heritage had been everything. And they did it with a specific marketing engine that is worth unpacking. Luna: What was the engine? Because I remember them being famous for influencer marketing, but that’s table stakes now. Lucas: Influencer seeding was the front door. They sent free watches to micro-influencers — not celebrities — like fitness accounts, travel bloggers, guys with 20,000 followers. The ask was simple: post a photo wearing the watch, use a discount code. No fee. Just the product. That created a massive library of user-generated content and social proof. Luna: So they traded inventory for exposure. Cheap if your unit cost is low. Lucas: Right. Their cost of goods was maybe $15 to $20 per watch. So sending out 5,000 free watches cost them $100,000 — but it generated millions of impressions and thousands of sales. The real magic, though, was what happened after the first click. Luna: The email funnel? Lucas: Yes. MVMT is a case study in email-driven conversion. When someone landed on their site, they were hit with a pop-up: 'Take 15% off your first order — enter your email.' That single email list became their most valuable asset. They’d send abandoned cart emails, product launch emails, and — this is the key — scarcity-based emails with countdown timers. Luna: Like 'only 50 left at this price' — that kind of thing? Lucas: Exactly. They'd run a flash sale on a specific model, send an email at 9 AM saying 'sale ends at midnight,' then send a follow-up at 11 PM saying 'last chance.' The open rates were absurdly high because the subject lines were specific: 'Your cart is about to expire' or 'These are almost gone.' And they backed it up with real inventory limits. Luna: Did they have data on how much of their revenue actually came from email? Lucas: They publicly said that email marketing drove about 20 to 30 percent of total revenue, with a return on ad spend of 7,000 percent on some campaigns. That's not a typo. Seven thousand percent. Meaning for every dollar they spent on email software and list building, they got $70 back. Compare that to paid social, where their ROAS was maybe 3x or 4x. Luna: That's insane. But it's also a specific moment in time. Email marketing is harder today with privacy changes, iOS updates, and inbox filters. Lucas: No question. The MVMT playbook launched in 2015, before Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, before GDPR really bit. But the principles are still valid: build a list, segment by behavior, send triggered messages. The difference now is you need more than a pop-up — you need a reason to stay subscribed. MVMT gave people a reason with constant new drops and limited editions. Luna: And they had a product that was easy to photograph and aspirational. That helped the influencer part too. Lucas: Totally. The watch was photogenic. It was a prop that fit any lifestyle shot — beach, desk, gym, date. That's why micro-influencers accepted the free product. It looked good on their feed. And MVMT made it easy by sending a pre-styled photo kit to some of them. So the barrier to posting was zero. Luna: Let's talk about the exit. They sold to Movado in 2018 for about $100 million. That was fast — three years from launch. Lucas: Yeah, it was a quick acquisition. Movado wanted a digital-native brand with a young audience. MVMT had over 1.5 million Instagram followers and a database of hundreds of thousands of email subscribers. Movado's traditional brand, Movado itself, was strong in retail but weak online. So the acquisition was about data and distribution. Movado kept the team and the brand separate. Luna: Did the founders stay on? I remember one of them left pretty quickly. Lucas: Kramer LaPlante left within a year or so. Jake Kassan stayed a bit longer but eventually moved on. That's typical in these DTC acquisitions — the founders are product-market fit people, not corporate managers. But the brand continued under Movado. It's still around today, though the growth has slowed because the novelty wore off and competition exploded. Luna: Which is the lesson, right? The playbook is copyable. Now every DTC watch brand does influencer seeding and email scarcity. The market is saturated. Lucas: Exactly. MVMT's success was partly first-mover advantage in the watch category for that specific strategy. Today, you need a stronger differentiator than 'designer look for less.' But the core loop — influencer drives traffic, email converts, social proof reinforces — is still the foundation for brands like Liquid Death, which we've talked about, or even newer luggage brands like Monos. Luna: It's interesting that you mention Monos. They do the same email scarcity thing: 'only 3 left in this color.' It works because it triggers loss aversion. Lucas: And they test the hell out of it. MVMT was obsessive about A/B testing subject lines, send times, and discount percentages. They had a culture of data that most startups don't have until they're much bigger. That's the underrated part of the story: it wasn't just creative marketing, it was operational discipline. Luna: If listeners want to dive deeper into these kinds of marketing mechanics, you know, we keep this show ad-free thanks to listener support. If these conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, buying us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo helps keep the lights on. No pressure, just if it's useful. Lucas: Yeah, that goes directly to hosting costs and research time. We appreciate it. Anyway, back to MVMT — one more thing I think is worth noting is how they handled customer reviews. They aggressively collected reviews on their site and used them in retargeting ads. So if someone browsed a watch but didn't buy, they'd see an ad featuring a four-star review from a real customer. That closed a lot of deals. Luna: That's the social proof loop. It's like a flywheel: influencer content feeds the site, email captures the lead, reviews reinforce the decision, and retargeting pulls back the ones who left. Lucas: Right. And MVMT automated that entire flywheel with tools like Klaviyo for email and some basic CRM integration. It wasn't rocket science. It was just well-executed. The question for brands today is: can you still build that flywheel when the cost per click on Instagram is triple what it was in 2015? Luna: Some brands are doing it with TikTok as the traffic source instead. Same loop, different platform. Lucas: Exactly. The platform changes, but the psychology doesn't. Scarcity, social proof, and a clear value proposition — those are timeless. MVMT just proved that when you execute them in a coordinated sequence, you can go from zero to $100 million in three years. Luna: And then sell to a legacy brand that wants your customer data. Lucas: Which is maybe the real exit strategy for any DTC brand today. Build the audience, prove the unit economics, and let a bigger player buy the growth.