Boardroom Socks

When your favorite sock companies go out of business or move operations overseas, and you can no longer find quality, American-made socks, the only reasonable thing to do is start your own sock manufacturing company. At least, that’s the case for Mike and Carol James, founders of Boardroom Socks.

A family-owned business out of North Carolina, Boardroom Socks is committed to providing customers with elegant and comfortable American-made socks constructed from premium materials like merino wool and extra-long staple cotton, all at an affordable price.

Or, as Nathan James, CEO of Boardroom Socks succinctly put it, “We truly believe you cannot find a better dress sock for a better price.”

That ethos has helped the company scale from a small business run out of a family home to a growing brand that is still in touch with its roots.

But in a world of rising advertising costs and exponentially more ecommerce competition, Boardroom Socks knew that to continue to stitch new customers into the company fabric, it needed a low-risk, high-ROI approach to marketing that was powerful enough to give their humbly sized team a leg up in their market.

Spinning Up New Sales

In the current ecommerce climate, individuals and companies alike are having to battle rising costs. For brands like Boardroom Socks, this means dealing with ever-increasing PPC advertising costs.

Facing this reality, the company needed to find a cost-effective way to diversify its customer acquisition efforts, establish a fixed ROI, and move away from relying on expensive PPC ad campaigns that are not guaranteed to produce results. At the same time, the implementation needed to seamlessly integrate with Boardroom Socks’ Shopify store and not become a time sink for the brand’s small team.

Ultimately, Boardroom Socks identified affiliate marketing as the strategy that fit the company’s needs and Refersion as the perfect solution for their organizational structure. As the brand asserted, Boardroom Socks opted to partner with Refersion because:

• The platform is easy to understand and use, providing a level of program visibility that other networks lack
• Refersion is simple for affiliate partners to utilize, thus allowing the brand to recruit more prominent affiliates and publishers.
• Refersion is incredibly powerful yet cost-effective for a small business like Boardroom Socks.

In November 2019, Boardroom Socks partnered with Refersion to cultivate a robust affiliate marketing program that would allow the brand to bring in new customers and protect the brand’s bottom line.

Knitting Together a New Marketing Strategy

With Refersion as a new partner, Boardroom Socks went to work crafting their new affiliate marketing program. For Boardroom Socks, this was remarkably simple as Refersion provided the brand with a streamlined means of integrating affiliate marketing directly into its Shopify store.

Through Refersion’s Marketplace, Boardroom Socks has been able to create and grow an affiliate program that is currently resulting in a significant source of revenue for the brand while simultaneously ensuring that investments of time and money remain reasonable for their team.

“Refersion has been able to seamlessly scale with the growth of our affiliate program. As we have brought on more publishers and process more transactions on a monthly basis, Refersion has continued to handle everything with ease.”

Nathan James, CEO

Thanks to the high-level overview provided by Refersion’s dashboard and the detailed reporting functionality offered by the platform, Boardroom Socks has been capable of getting a bird’s eye view of its program and diving down into the minutia of its campaign performance.

Using this information, Boardroom Socks has gained a deep understanding of its affiliate performance and understand how to continue optimizing the brand’s program to reap exponentially greater rewards.

Boardroom Socks + Refersion = Increased Revenue

In the three years since Boardroom Socks teamed up with Refersion, the company has grown its affiliate program into an indispensable part of its marketing strategy.

As Nathan James professed, “Our affiliate traffic converts roughly five times higher than the remainder of our traffic. As our program has continued to grow, it now constitutes over 10 percent of our revenue.”

But that’s not all. In the time Boardroom Socks has been working with Refersion, the brand has also achieved the following:

• Over the last 12 months, affiliate revenue has grown 26%
• Over the last 12 months, conversion rate has gone up 50%
• Over the last 3 years, monthly revenue from affiliate sales is up nearly 220%
• 20X increase in total program revenue to date

Because of the remarkable, reliable growth Boardroom Socks has experienced through its affiliate marketing efforts, the company plans on doubling down on its affiliate program in the coming years, focused on continuing to grow the percentage of company revenue that comes from its affiliates.

In the end, Boardroom Socks’ experience with Refersion affiliate marketing can be succinctly summed up in Nathan James’ simple statement:

“We’re a small team with limited resources, so having the power of Refersion at our disposal means we are able to spend less time running our affiliate program and more time growing it.”

Nathan James, CEO