If you live in New York City and saw a Fishwife store appear on Google Maps a few weeks ago, it wasn’t a fever dream. For two weekends in late September and early October, the tinned-fish company set up a temporary brick-and-mortar shop in Manhattan’s NoLita neighborhood.
After soliciting the help of partner and email and SMS marketing platform Klaviyo, which it’s been working with since 2020, the Fishwife team created an experience modeled off of Portuguese conservas shops that incorporated Fishwife’s “super colorful” and “little bit irreverent” branding, Becca Millstein, CEO and co-founder of Fishwife, told us.
For the two weekends it was open, the location served up everything from caviar on ice cream to customized necklaces from Susan Alexandra—and it delivered big results for the brand, Millstein said: The pop-up drew more than 5,000 total attendees and brought in $91,000 in revenue, doubling expectations. The initial goal, she said, was to drive brand awareness through social media impressions, and according to the company, the pop-up generated 4.3 million impressions, more than 200 pieces of UGC, and 10,000 new followers for Fishwife.
“I think when you make a really big deal out of something and clearly put a lot of work into it, the response is often proportional to that,” Millstein said. “I also think the food program was very exciting to a lot of people.”
An even bigger idea came out of the pop-up partnership, and Fishwife is now featured in Klaviyo’s first Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) campaign, which Millstein called “a real, enormous cherry on top.”
We spoke with Millstein and Klaviyo’s CMO Jamie Domenici about what to expect from that campaign rolling out over the next month, called “Make Every Moment Count,” which will also feature food influencer and chef Alison Roman.
Pay a(tin)tion
This year’s BFCM campaign marks Fishwife’s biggest holiday campaign to date. By starting in September, the hope is to position the brands ahead of the curve with holiday messaging and reach both Fishwife’s retail customers, who tend to be millennial women, as well as Klaviyo’s potential business clients in the SMB category, Millstein and Domenici said.
Domenici told us that Fishwife was the right fit for the campaign because it’s a “great representation of the brands that [Klaviyo] is trying to look for: a fast-growing, founder-led, female[-run], sustainable company.” By highlighting existing business clients like Fishwife, she said the hope is to build brand awareness with potential future clients.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking for a buzzy brand,” Domenici said. “I had no idea about the cult-like following of tin fish until I went and stood in that long line for the pop-up that was around the corner.”
The “Make Every Moment Count” campaign will run across streaming, digital, social, OOH, and podcasts, Domenici said. Millstein said she was particularly excited about the campaign’s placement on podcasts like Today, Explained, which she said could serve to help reach Fishwife’s target millennial demographic.
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Another treat aimed at millennials is Alison Roman, who will incorporate the Fishwife and Klaviyo ads into her annual YouTube Thanksgiving prep video, participate in a Q&A with Millstein, and appear in an ad with Millstein that will air on Disney streaming platforms and YouTube. Roman’s followers can also expect to see some organic social posts from the chef, according to Klaviyo.
“I definitely attribute so much of the excitement around tinned fish in the millennial demographic—and below and above—to Alison Roman,” Millstein said. “Over the years, we’ve gone back and forth over email and on social media, but we’ve never actually met or collaborated on something together so it was really, really incredible that Klaviyo made the culmination of this relationship possible.”
Through both the Klaviyo campaign and its own separate marketing efforts, Millstein said Fishwife is focused on promoting its holiday-specific products, including caviar, crewnecks, and gift tin bundles, across social, email, and SMS.
Because SMS is its highest converting communication channel, Millstein said the brand plans to give its 11,000 subscribers special offers before opening them up to other channels.
“With BFCM, you have to be so thoughtful, because your customers are getting so many communications from so many companies,” Millstein said.
Klaviyo has other OOH ads that highlight brands it works with outside of the CPG industry, Domenici said, including swimwear brand Budgy Smugglers and bag brand Dagne Dover, in New York, LA, and London, which the company determined are key markets for reaching potential clients based on traffic.
While Domenici said Klaviyo won’t necessarily be doing pop-ups for all campaign kickoffs, she acknowledged that the energy Fishwife’s pop-up brought is “definitely what [she wants the] brand to be associated with.”
As for whether Millstein would ever consider opening a permanent Fishwife store?
“It’s always been sort of a twinkle in our eye,” she said. “It’s definitely on the five-year vision board.”
Correction 10/31/2024: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of Alison Roman's name.