Maven Fuzzy Factory Analysis

Maven Fuzzy Factory is an eCommerce in the Toys & Learning industry. They currently have four products in market . . . all are stuffed toys (i.e., bear, panda etc.)

After initial database exploration to understand the business (i.e., revenue, profit, products, orders, website visitors, customers etc.), we were asked to create an EER diagram and enhance it by adding relationships and generating the associated code.

Last, we had to answer some specific questions around website sessions and orders trends, growth rate of their products, refunds, and paid channel analysis.

The combination of the initial exploratory queries and the business questions triggered my appetite to understand if Maven Fuzzy Factory was a commercially viable business for the future? While there are many more dimensions that will need to be provided and researched (i.e., financial), my initial assessment is that yes, Maven Fuzzy Factory is a viable business, but they have the opportunity to explore some recommendations that could positively impact their business.

KEY FINDINGS –

1. Simply put, their business (website visitors, customers, orders, revenue etc.) has pretty much doubled in the span of a couple of years.
2. The number of website visitors and orders follow a seasonality and do spike during the EOY holiday season.
3. The spike could be driven by new product launches, which are included within holiday season promotions. This is a fine marketing strategy that positively impacts both, sessions & existing product sales volume, but minimally impacts newly launched product.
4. Their conversion rate is at least twice the eCommerce industry average and 3 times the Toys & Learning industry average.
5. The growth rate of all their products and more specifically the oldest ones (‘The original Mr. Fuzzy” and “the Forever Love Bear”) are astonishingly good. They respectively fall into the Hyper Growth and Light Speed Growth categories as defined for eCommerce businesses.
6. However, at the exception of their oldest products, the volume of sales for the other products is at least 5x lower than their first market offering.
7. The product quality of all their offerings is good and the returns rate is way below industry standard.
8. Their paid ads search channels have been performing very well even but they have barely done any campaigns for paid social media channels.

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS -

1. Continue to focus on product quality. Maven Fuzzy Factory seems to have good product quality. They should conduct a proper NPS survey to get a true read on their customers satisfaction and explore improvement opportunities.
2. Target existing customer with a unique marketing campaign. Maven Fuzzy Factory has been at large focusing on acquiring new customers. Their install based has more than doubled in the span of two years. Yet, their returning customers rate is at 2%. This is low and they should explore to upsell and cross sell to their customers.
3. Target new customers with social media campaigns. It is not unusual for new businesses to focus on paid ads search channels first for them to find new customers. However, as the business is growing, it is a great opportunity to leverage the footprint of social media giants and powerful customers profiling capabilities to enable new customers to find them based on the customers own interests and profile information. Maven Fuzzy Factory should develop a customer profile (NPS survey suggestion above could help them greatly for this task) for paid social channels and a marketing strategy for this channel.