The Pennock Knockdown: Marketing Insights from Noho: Humor, Sustainability, and the 'Seeking Lovers' Campaign
Watch or Listen to Episode 9 of The Pennock Knockdown.
Listen on Apple and Spotify. Watch on TikTok or Youtube.
Di with Noho Direct to consumer and B2B marketing lead.
Dianna Clapperton-Adams is a seasoned marketing professional with a strong background in brand development and design direction. Currently spearheading marketing efforts at Noho, a sustainable furniture company, Dianna has played a pivotal role in expanding the brand’s presence in both the U.S. and New Zealand markets. With a passion for blending creativity and strategy, she brings innovative approaches to digital marketing and storytelling. Dianna thrives on empowering brands to make an impact through engaging, meaningful and sustainable campaigns.
Noho is a direct-to-consumer furniture brand focused on growth within the U.S. market. Celebrating the tangible, and intangible joys of home, Noho creates furniture that helps make home a place to enjoy, with a lighter impact on the planet. All Noho furniture is designed by sister company, Formway, and starts with a purpose—carefully considering health and comfort, from conscious materials while ensuring each product is designed to last a long time. Noho is a certified B Corp.
Brands Mentioned
Transcript
Nikki Lindgren:
Welcome to another episode of the Pennock Knockdown, a podcast where we unpack key strategies and tactics for digital marketing leaders. I'm joined today with Di. She is with Noho, where she is the lead of direct-to-consumer and B2B marketing. Di, it's so nice to have you on the show today.
Dianna:
Yeah, thanks very much for having me. I'm excited to have a chat.
Nikki Lindgren:
So, Di, I'd love to hear a little bit about both Noho and your background that led you to joining the company.
Dianna:
I've been in marketing for about seven to eight years now. Prior to that, I was mainly in content design and brand development, working for in-house companies here in New Zealand, mainly across the outdoor fashion industry here. And I was contracted and freelanced for a lot of startups who wanted to grow their brand and marketing development.
In a wide range, really a wide range of sectors, many of them growing in the US market. Interestingly enough, being from New Zealand, we're very geographically isolated and a small nation in the bottom of the world. So we naturally look to grow internationally, and behind China, the US is our second-largest export market. So there's a lot of marketing work and a lot of great businesses here.
Wanting, looking for growth within the US. So that's really amazing. So I joined Noho at the end of 2021. The company actually launched early in 2020 as a direct-to-consumer sustainable furniture brand amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we all know dearly.
And we're really operating as a dual entity in both New Zealand and the US. And in terms of the Noho brand itself and what we stand for is that we really try to celebrate the tangible and intangible joys of home. So we try and be more than a product. We're a brand that really celebrates and really tries to deepen connections between people and enrich that home environment.
So our target audience is really focused on affluent millennials who are city dwellers and who are very sustainably minded. So our product range is really sort of small. We have three main products. One of them is the Noho Move Chair, an oracle product. And it's designed to move with users as you're sitting around the dining tables to really assist with any activity that you do in the heart of the home from dining experiences to working from home to teaching the kids homework. And it's really unique in the market itself. Our second product is the Lightly Chair, which is our stackable, fun, very colorful range of chairs that are really for both the home and commercial settings. And it's made out of a plant-based polymer from the castor bean material as well as recycled plastic. And our last most recent product is the Dine Table range, which again has a great sustainability story. It is made from conscious materials like recycled alloy wheels in the frame as well as certified timber tops. So all of our products have a very strong functional story, a design story, and a sustainable, a very good sustainability story. Yeah, so all of our furniture is designed by our sister company, Fomway, who have a reputation for delivering world-class residential and commercial products globally. And they work with licensing partners, including the likes of Noll and Ntootsi in Italy. And their philosophy really does stem from creating products from...
Nikki Lindgren:
For it.
Dianna:
Understanding a genuine human need and using insights from sitting in people's homes and seeing what they do there to really get a gauge and an understanding of kind of what people actually need that is broader and deeper than just what they say. So it's like also watching what they do and their behaviors to work out what they need, which is really, really unique.
Nikki Lindgren:
That is, I love that there is a mission-driven approach here and just more of cultivating products and solutions for needs rather than just product for the sake of product. So thank you for walking through a little bit more about the portfolio and who you're working with, partners, et cetera. Dianna, you and I met when you were working on planning a really awesome campaign that you were building here in the state.
I'm excited to get into that, but before we do, and any other topics related to marketing, I'd love to understand with your tentacles in the furniture space, are there brands or products that you're really keeping a close eye on and finding really unique or awesome?
Dianna:
Got a bit of a list of three. These ones aren't necessarily new to market, but they're ones that I do go back to and look at regularly. So I've got two furniture ones and one fragrance brand that I continue to go back to. So the first one is called Dow Jones, which isn't the index. It's a furniture brand based in Australia, founded by Adam Lynch and Dale Hardiman in 2014.
So they have really beautiful, bright colored pieces that really stand out from the market. And then that then translates into the way that they market their products through their social channels on their website. They have a really fun, interesting way to engage the audience that is outside of just the beautiful products. And that really resonates with me. And the way that they do things is just lovely and really strong.
My second furniture brand, which I love and I continue to go back to and just ooh and ah over their product range is Waka Waka, based in LA. And that's just really bespoke wooden furniture and objects crafted by Shin Okuda. I hope I'm saying their name correctly. But I just love the gorgeous simplicity to the products that he creates. And that is a real strong point of difference.
For them and one of their products in particular I'd absolutely love one day, which is their leaning cylinder back chair in burgundy red but we'll see one day maybe.
Nikki Lindgren:
I'm excited to check this out.
Dianna:
Absolutely. And my third one, the not so new fragrance brand based in Brooklyn, New York is DS & Dirga. So I guess I'm just continuously drawn to the way that they produce scents that's very different and unique and stands out. Then they also, like Dow Jones, translate into the way that they then speak to the market and what they produce through their website channels, their social channels, their advertising.
Everything is very cohesive in the way that they kind of produce their content as well as the products. So everything's lovely, beautiful. And yeah, so I'd love to try the limited edition cowgirl grass perfume, which I think is new and up on the website currently. And that has looks like it's got peony fragrances and musk and they've also kind of got grass tones to it, which sounds really...
Unique, and I'm naturally drawn to kind of peony and musk, so the addition of grass is really interesting. So that's definitely one I'd like to give a go from them but great brands, all three of them, check them out.
Nikki Lindgren:
Yeah, I appreciate you walking through this and it kind of, you know, paints the storyline of your interest and passion for great branding, great product, and like really bringing something into the world and our spaces that's meaningful and purpose-driven. So I appreciate the details you shared around the brands and the whys, not just the brands themselves. Yeah, so I'd love to move into some of what's...
Dianna:
All good.
Nikki Lindgren:
...going on in the marketing landscape for you. So you've had a few years now with Noho, so you've got some history in terms of what types of strategies or campaigns have really worked and maybe some that didn't go as you or the team has intended. If you can take a minute to walk us through some of those, that would be wonderful.
Dianna, you and I were connected a handful of months ago to talk about where you were with a new campaign that you're launching here in the States called Seeking Lovers. I'd love to hear more about the details of what you have planned in that campaign.
Dianna:
This stemmed from a few things that we noticed through our brand building and marketing journey. And at the end of last year was definitely a bit of a wild one. We were facing an election. We saw rising CPMs as other businesses and companies started to do their promotion full blast once that election was over. And then that timing of the Black Friday Cyber Monday week where it landed at the end of November and leading into December.
Was definitely different from what I'd seen in the past. So it was lots of fluctuations and especially as a small brand, we had to really find a way to stand out within that chaos and that mess, not mess, but you know what I mean. It was very different and really create cut-through in a way that was unique, but still really on-brand for us. So for...
Background in 2023, we actually undertook a rebrand honing our visual approach, redefining our website in the way that we communicated who we are to market. And during that process, we worked with New York-based artists, Wade and Leta, who have worked with many great companies from Adobe to Herman Miller to Google, Gucci. They've even worked with DS & Dirga on a lot of their campaign work as well.
And they also create beautiful experiential pieces globally from Japan to Singapore and also throughout the US. So we were really lucky to work with them on our brand development. And they really defined how we represent our products to stand out in a saturated furniture market specifically and humor being...
The driving force of that, if you look at our website, you'll see that people are sitting upside down on chairs or backwards, or we've got two people on chairs, for example, or we've got people in ghillie suits, which represent the sustainability stories that we have for each of our products. So they really thought outside the box when it came to how we represent our furniture and brand and how we do stand out. So, and also I guess...
Being a company based in New Zealand, working with collaborators who are in market is very important to us so that we understand what's going on on the ground. We can only really understand as much as we possibly can being based here. Wayne and Lita have an affinity with really understanding who our target group is and they are technically that. So it was really using people who are our market to try and...
Gain awareness and market share for our product. So we also interestingly find that humor in our advertising doesn't fatigue as quickly. So that was a driving force to how we delivered our Q4 marketing campaign, Seeking Furniture Lovers. So...
Our in-house team then took what Wayne and Lisa started with the brand to kick into the campaign. And it really was about drawing awareness and attention to the Noho brand, our product range, by creating a love story about finding the perfect furniture match. It was, in a way, kind of like we were dating our potential customers, wooing them with cheesy pick-up lines, love poems. We created a lovers' mixtape, or in our case, a...
A lovers Spotify playlist. We wrote personal ads for each of our products as if they were a human looking for their perfect love match in furniture. And we really drew on those unique selling points for each of our products. For example, one of the lines for our Noho moved here was, "You like the way we Noho move," or for lightly it was, "I'll be the lightly of your life," kind of thing.
The really aim of the campaign was to connect people on an emotional level through unconventional ways and through unconventional channels, especially for a direct-to-consumer furniture brand, which was really fun.
Nikki Lindgren:
And so I might have a little bit of a background on how and where this was executed, but can you talk a little bit more about where this campaign rolled out and how?
Dianna:
We did a lot across our organic channels, mainly Instagram, TikTok, and that as well as our email marketing campaigns really engaging our existing audience group through that. And then we also did brand awareness campaigns across Meta and Google. And we also did a targeted campaign towards dating apps, which we felt would be really interesting and the unique way to...
Just step outside the box to find a new audience group. So it was really interesting and really unique way to kind of go about it.
Nikki Lindgren:
And then was the targeting approach nationwide across the US or how did you do like, was there any geography play in the work that was done?
Dianna:
Experience, initially when we first kicked off the Noho brand, we did go broad across the US, but we soon refocus our efforts towards mainly California, New York, and just those bigger kind of key markets that we saw, we saw performance come through. So I think we also included Florida and Texas kind of, which are big massive states if you're comparing to New Zealand market, which we've got a 5 million people when you're comparing to the US, which I think in California has 38 million plus people. So, you know, for a small brand, we really do need to be very targeted or as target as we possibly can with kind of what we do and what we create.
Nikki Lindgren:
You focused on statewide California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
Dianna:
Yes, yes we did. Yeah, yeah we did in the end.
Nikki Lindgren:
Awesome. Yeah, I...
Fun to a whole new level. So this was a brilliant campaign, really well planned and executed. I appreciate you walking through it. Now that it's coming on, guess, what have you been finding in terms of the impact that the campaign had on the business?
Dianna:
So that part was really interesting. So alongside that awareness work, we actually did a lead generation campaign to boost our email marketing because we know and we see massive value on that side of our marketing efforts. So what we did for that was a giveaway of a dining set. And all of that really kind of resonated or it fitted in with that brand messaging as well.
That was $4,000 worth of product that we did give away in that campaign. And we saw about a 20 % increase in subscribers during that. And as well as that giveaway, during the awareness part of that campaign work, we saw a 200 % increase in our social followers compared to the two months prior as well. And that massively assisted with our performance during that Black Friday...
Week and beyond as well too. That was really great for us.
Nikki Lindgren:
That's incredible. From...
Was the was that lead gen initiative like tied to and you know, was the look and feel of it, guess is my question, similar to seeking lovers or was it a totally separate?
Dianna:
Look and feel of it was really connected to that Seeking Lovers campaign. Yeah, so everything over that period was very cohesive in the brand visual approach and the content that we produced for that. That was just one element of the bigger campaign. But because we'd seen, we knew that we needed to kind of boost those email subscribers leading into that busy selling, buying period.
And that was by doing a giveaway and including that in the marketing mix that actually kind of was beneficial for us massively.
Nikki Lindgren:
So you're a purpose-driven, high-end luxury brand, and you had a ton of success with a giveaway. How does that fit into forward-looking strategies? Is this something you think the team will be repeating more often?
Dianna:
The main draw card, I guess, from this campaign was to do something that's a little bit different, to try and stand out from the market, do something that's really unique, but also on brand. So yes, we'll definitely be doing giveaway campaigns in the future to assist with leads that flow into our email. But as you say...
We're a high value, high design furniture brand. So it does take time for people to actually decide that this is the right product for them. They've got to go through that journey of understanding who we are, what our products do, how it's going to fit into their lives. So there can be quite a long lead time into that. But by kind of creating awareness initially, doing something a little bit different, potentially like doing that addition of a giveaway.
Getting them in the mix, and then having a really, really great email flow, educational email flow, then really does contribute to that kind long-term growth of your business and what you're doing. So yes, we'll definitely be looking to repeat that. We won't do kind of a giveaway of that size very often, but it was really beneficial for us. Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren:
In summary of all of the positive results coming out of the campaign overall and the giveaway, what will you kind of take as a win and move into future campaign builds?
Dianna:
I think definitely that continuation of humor and doing something a little bit outside the box in terms of the way that we approach that will definitely be taking that into future work that we do. We see that, like I mentioned earlier, the use of humor also means that you're advertising and your content lasts a lot longer as well. So you don't need to kind of continuously iterate.
On something that works really well. We've tried multiple times to slot in another ad or something else that we think will resonate a lot more with our audience. And we always seem to find that the initial one that we produced that had that humor in it seems to just stand the test of time and have a lot of engagement. So we end up putting those back in, which is actually like really great to kind of.
Have that as a backstop that we know that's going to work. So we'll just keep continuing to do it. Other things that we may look to continue. I think the main thing is that deepening of our email channel and furthering the educational content and the aspect of what we learned and we'll definitely continue with that as well.
Nikki Lindgren:
I do have to ask, because you talked about the wittiness and the fun of the campaign and then the experience on the website coming to the homepage and the fun you can have there with the branding. Was that part of the brand at launch or is that something that came as a result of the learnings?
Dianna:
I think the humor aspect was brought in with the rebrand with our work with Wayne and Leta. And because we saw that, because the advertising that we did create with them and the organic content that we saw with them that added humor and how that resonated with our audience, that's where the idea then stemmed to continue that and do something a little bit different for this campaign as well. So it was definitely at that rebrand phase with Wayne and Leta.
That that humor was bought in. And so we thought we'd continue on that journey because we had seen that resonate.
Nikki Lindgren:
And...
Were there any, I know some brands, again, like the more considered purchases, the higher end things, sometimes brands that stay in that lane wanna be much more serious and a little bit different in how they position themselves. Did leadership at Noho have any troubles accepting this idea of moving into a more humorous lane or did it just feel like a good next step for the business?
Dianna:
Yeah, that's a great question. We continued to present what we were doing to our senior leadership and they were trusting of what we wanted to do and how we were going ahead with that.
Were all on board for all of the Wayne and Leta work. So, no, they were very supportive of bringing this humorous aspect to it. It's always, it can be a bit risky, as you say, especially as other furniture brands are very serious in their tone and they look lovely and beautiful and they have wonderful stories behind each of their brands and products as well. But we, as a small furniture brand from New Zealand, we needed to do something that was really unique and different. We do have the wonderful product stories. We do have the beautiful, like, in-depth sustainability stories. We have the beautiful case studies of our products situated in beautiful homes and UGC content as well. Having something that then stood out again on top using that humorous element to draw in and really build awareness of the brand was just another addition to deeper stories in other areas of the product and the business and the brand and what we do. Yeah, our senior leadership has been really, really supportive and really happy to kind of go ahead with testing the waters and seeing what we can do. So, no, really, really...
Nikki Lindgren:
Sometimes it can be such a battle to make those changes. So awesome to hear with you guys. We're well into 2025 already, and some of us are still fine-tuning Q3, Q4 details. Any changes in the marketing mix or where you guys are going to be focusing your time either as a symptom of the Seeking Lovers campaign or just overall trends you're observing with the business?
Dianna:
I think I've heard a few other guest viewers saying the exact same thing, but just the use of AI and marketing and how we can now leverage and lean on a lot of that, but using it more as a starting point to get ideas or get starts and content or that kind of thing is going to be really massive for us.
Obviously, you need that human aspect and that human eye over it to make sure that it resonates. It doesn't necessarily understand humor, for example, in different locations. So we need to be quite clear about that and just making sure that it does actually resonate with your brand. But that's really, really big for us. Also, really leaning on owned media channels this year is going to be really big for us. Building our content out, deepening...
Like I mentioned, deepening our marketing efforts and to nurture our audience. That's definitely not necessarily new, but it's something that we'll just continue to do. And another one is sustainability marketing. Again, we've been on top of this since the get-go, but we'll continue to be open about our sustainability claims being really transparent. With our storytelling on that side, the great thing is that we are a B-corp certified business.
So everything is certified through a third party that what we say is honest. And we're honored to be at B Corp and be amongst all those amazing other businesses on the same journey. But yeah, we've recently launched our first impact report, which summarizes our supply chain, our product life cycle, along with information on the design and material choices that we've chosen for each product.
So we'll just continue to tell those really deep, wonderful stories about kind of what we do and why we do it and use interesting campaigns to draw people in initially.
Nikki Lindgren:
That all sounds like some really good stuff to be focused on. I think my final question for you related to like the marketing efforts and the states you're focused on here in the US. Have there been any learnings? Like have states gone differently than expected? Is there a new fifth state popping in that you weren't really anticipating any changes in like the mix of where you will spend media dollars when you do run ads?
Dianna:
California and New York have always been really great states for us and very aligned to our target audience group. I think Florida is a really new one for us and something that's been a little bit left field. Also Texas, but then there's a lot of growth there, so that's quite understandable. So those two are the ones that we're recently kind of starting to kind of dig into a little bit more. So, yeah, really, really interesting.
And it'll be interesting to kind of see how this year plays out.
Nikki Lindgren:
You'll be building more and more states as the year goes on, I'm sure.
Dianna:
I guess.
Nikki Lindgren:
So as we wrap, I'd love to just kind of hear what advice our guests would give to the younger self if they were starting all over again in the industry.
Dianna:
A really lovely one. And it took me a little bit to kind of sit back and think about it. But my main thing would be to tell younger Di, that great things take time, but also trust your gut. Like none of this is, is, is easy. You learn continuously and you're growing to growing continuously. But at the end of the day, you know, the other thing is don't be afraid to do something that's different, stand out from the crowd.
Definitely learn from experiences of others, but don't be afraid to push boundaries and do something that is a little bit different, because that could create a new trend that could like, you know, be so unique that, you know, it just has resonance with the right audience. So try the only thing you on my first job we worked really we had a
We worked with IDEO for a little bit to kind of help define the way that, again, in New Zealand spoke to an American audience, which was really beneficial in my first role. And one thing that they taught us was learn fast, fail often. So that has continuously stuck with me. Prototype, throw things out there, see how it sticks. And so that's something that's always really resonated and something that I continuously try and do.
So I just will say to younger Di or future people or to people who are looking to get into the market or who are new to marketing, try something out, see how it goes, test and iterate and go from there.
Nikki Lindgren:
Yeah.
And when you read the data, it's really quick to see if the test is working or not. So that's the great thing about the industry we're in where there's so much data to pull from to prove whether your test is successful. So I really appreciate it.
Dianna:
Absolutely.
It's much cheaper to do it now than it was when I was, when I starting it. Yeah, throw some ads out and see what happens.
Nikki Lindgren:
Yeah.
Well, Dara, it was so nice to have you on the show today. People should head over to knowho.co to check out the beautiful furniture. Any other links or recommendations of where people can go to get in touch?
Dianna:
Yeah, definitely visit our Instagram page, which is at Noho underscore co. You can also find us on TikTok or Facebook, which has the same link, I think at Noho.co.
Nikki Lindgren:
Great, we will put all of those links in the show notes. So Di, so great to have you on the show.
Dianna:
Thank you so much, Nikki. It's been great to chat.
