Manhattan Beachwear has been making waves in fashion swimwear since its launch in the late 1980s. Using a pervasive coverage strategy, spanning the full spectrum of luxury department stores, the brand has developed a reputation for chic designs and quality, fueling the growth and success of an impressive portfolio of iconic brands, including La Blanca, 24^th & Ocean, Maxine of Hollywood, and Hobie.  

With fashion and shopping trends always shifting, the company has evolved and adapted its go-to-market tactics to cater to the customer journey, both online and in-store. In recent years, Manhattan Beachwear has focused heavily on its ecommerce position by nurturing its growing presence on Amazon, social media, direct-to-consumer, and digital marketplaces. The team kicked off a partnership with Stackline in 2019 to unlock visibility into the rapidly shifting ecommerce landscape and activate impactful advertising strategies.  

Sinking out-of-date metrics

As Manhattan Beachwear transitioned to meet the online shopping demands of consumers, leadership sought to mimic the decades of success they had seen across the brick-and-mortar realm. They focused on expanding their reach across a variety of digital marketplaces, including their own DTC website; However, like other high-performing brands, they quickly realized that traditional digital advertising metrics offered little to no real value when looking to truly understand performance. ROAS proved misleading, as it does not consider organic click share when evaluating effectiveness, leaving Manhattan Beachwear's leaders seeking out more accurate insights into their marketing strategies.  

Enter incrementality - a method of measuring and attributing only what increases from an advertising activity - making sure Manhattan Beachwear’s high-ROAS campaigns didn’t mask lower than expected customer capture. The team turned to Stackline to better understand their markets and consumers and identify opportunities to make those incremental performance improvements as they gain momentum across new and existing channels.

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Nothing beats Stackline for accurate and rich market data reporting. I mean nothing. It's a pro-level tool that is on a whole other level. - Karim Hachem VP, Ecommerce

Incrementality deep dive

In the first half of 2022, major brands in the Manhattan Beachwear portfolio, including La Blanca, began losing a significant share to competitors. Their existing agency partners were still relying on traditional metrics, like ROAS, which made the brand appear to have ‘good’ advertising presence, so the reason for slippage was difficult to ascertain. Upon closer analysis, the Manhattan Beachwear team found that these misguided metrics were masking the full performance story, leaving them blind to the competitive set and other root causes. As a result, the brand upgraded their advertising strategy to include expert automation, intelligence, and guidance from Stackline’s Atlas, Beacon, Drive, and Professional Services offerings to fill in the gaps they in their go-to-market approach.

Since signing up with Stackline, they have helped us execute on the level that we want.   - Karim Hachem VP, Ecommerce

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With the support of Stackline technology and Professional Service solutions, Manhattan Beachwear has effectively navigated major advertising challenges that previous, more traditional providers left them blind to. The joint team immediately tapped into Stackline’s toolset to develop, forecast, and launch a series of campaigns focused on reversing massive market share slides for their key brands. Over the course of a 26-week period, this new strategy generated a 1000% increase in optimization capabilities, automating over 1.5M optimizations for La Blanca campaigns alone. The combination of data, services, and automation also fueled a 570 basis-point-increase in market share year-over-year, catapulting the brand into the undisputed category leader position by early 2023.

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Every season is beach season

Today, every Manhattan Beachwear campaign strategy and optimization tactic focuses on increasing ad visibility to relevant shoppers lower in the purchase funnel, ultimately yielding higher conversion rates for every product. Experts from Stackline’s Professional Services team conduct regular, in-depth advertising and shopper behavior analysis for each of the Manhattan Beachwear brands and their ongoing campaigns including closely monitoring paid and organic share. The knowledge derived from these examinations combined with Stackline’s proprietary incrementality metrics empowers the team to identify and act on new and existing opportunities to connect with buyers throughout the year.  

As the Manhattan Beachwear and Stackline partnership has scaled, the brand has unlocked new avenues for growth, including competitive conquesting, an advertising strategy that had previously yielded negligible success for the brand. Recognizing the growth potential on Amazon, the Stackline team evaluated the marketplace and found that many of Manhattan Beachwear’s brick and mortar competitors do not participate in the marketplace, but also that shoppers were actively searching for those brands online. The team successfully launched and continually optimized campaigns that highlight SKUs in the Manhattan Beachwear portfolio to customers that are searching for relevant competitive branded terms across Amazon. This successful advertising tactic is just one example of how Manhattan Beachwear engages Stackline’s outcome-based optimization strategies and services to deliver measurable performance improvements across every brand and product in their portfolio.  

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It's essential to have a tool to tell you where you are at, where your competition is at, and ultimately find incremental whitespace opportunities.   - Karim Hachem VP, Ecommerce

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Seas the market share

Thanks to a synergistic go-to-market approach focused on incrementality, key Manhattan Beachwear brands, including La Blanca, now maintain leadership positions in their target marketplaces. Since enhancing their partnership with Stackline in June 2022, their incremental sales attributed to ad spend have skyrocketed by 156% compared to the prior period. By focusing advertising tactics on maximizing incremental performance across every SKU, conversion rates have steadily increased by 59%. Simultaneously, those flagship brands, like La Blanca, have seen a healthy decline of 63% in CPCs.  

Stackline is honored to partner with incredible brands across the globe, especially Manhattan Beachwear – who highlights the innovation and success that incrementality-focused efforts can drive in the ecommerce ecosystem.  

‍About Stackline

On a mission to fuel the future of commerce by bringing brands and customers closer together, Stackline is the first full-funnel connected commerce platform for the world's most innovative brands.  Business leaders, product innovators, performance marketers, and financial firms trust Stackline as the single source of commerce truth.  Fueled by proprietary neural networks and deep learning systems, Stackline's market insights, revenue metrics, behavioral data, and autonomous functionality create the actions that determine success or failure.

Founded in 2014 in Seattle, Stackline employs over 250 connected commerce professionals creating value for 7,000 global brands.

For additional information visit www.stackline.com

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