Reeds & Virgils Soda
Premium Ginger Beer and Zero Sugar Soda Overflows with Sales on Amazon
Industries
Consumer Packaged Goods
Overview
Reed’s is a producer of all-natural craft sodas, and ginger brew, and the owner of Virgil’s Zero Sugar sodas including its signature root beer for connoisseurs. In 1987, after researching century-old soft drink recipes, Chris Reed―the company’s founder and namesake―perfected the art of home-brewing using whole roots, spices, and fruit juices. These early experiments in soda-making ultimately rippled into the very first commercial enterprise producing brewed sodas in the world.
Now as a publicly traded company with a portfolio of products being sold in over 30K retail stores in the United States, Reed’s recently streamlined its product line from over 100 Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) to approximately 28 focusing almost exclusively on the excitement and fizz of Reed’s and Virgil’s soda lines. These lines include Reed’s Original Ginger, Extra Ginger, and Strongest Ginger marketed by the intensity of the ginger taste along with Zero Sugar ginger beers sweetened with an all-natural proprietary blend. The Zero Sugar concept has also been successfully extended to popular Virgil’s flavors such as Root Beer, Vanilla Cream, Cola, and Black Cherry Cream.
Situation
While both Reed’s and its acquired brand Virgil’s have a well-established niche in specialty gourmet, natural food, retail stores, and restaurants, they wanted to expand their market share and channels beyond the traditional brick-and-mortar realm that the business was originally built on. They knew the first step in this direction was to establish a real online presence where Reed’s and Virgil’s could directly reach consumers with its natural choice brews and sodas. To help increase the level of thirst for its beverages online, they turned to SellerSlice to brainstorm a bona fide strategy and provide full execution for it in the biggest virtual marketplace in the world―Amazon.
The SellerSlice Impact
SellerSlice was thrilled to have the opportunity to effectively place and optimize Reed’s and Virgil’s product lines in the Amazon Marketplace to increase its presence and sales. Duke Kroll, CEO of SellerSlice and former Amazon content executive, said, “This is the perfect time for Amazon customers to be introduced to these award-winning beverage brands that have already gained an enormous following in other retail markets. These high-quality craft sodas have all the ingredients to attract consumers already familiar with the brand and to establish new fans as well.”
Without any formal strategy in place, Reed’s and Virgil’s already had a bare-boned presence on Amazon that was not getting the results desired. So, SellerSlice quickly moved to develop a detailed strategy into a highly actionable plan to establish Reed’s and Virgil’s as real players in the ultra-competitive Soda Soft Drinks category on Amazon.
The first phase of this plan was to provide a robust e-commerce strategy that focused on driving brand awareness of Reed’s Real Ginger Ale and Virgil’s Zero Sugar soda lines. SellerSlice worked diligently to prepare these brands for a new online presence by developing and overhauling the content of their product listings on Amazon to fully optimize for search and conversion.
Title and detail pages for products were designed to pop by adding visual assets and infographics designed to be informative and streamline the consumer shopping experience. Text placement included well-researched keywords to attract new consumers of crafted sodas and ginger beer. Metadata was adjusted properly to correctly optimize and position Reed’s and Virgil’s in Amazon’s massive catalog for ease of searching.
There was no existing plan to drive e-commerce sales, so SellerSlice worked with Reed’s to link its website directly to Amazon’s marketplace by routing targeted traffic to gain increased sales while more efficiently enabling conversions of their beverage products online. Another focal point for propelling Reed’s and Virgil’s brands on Amazon was to strategically adjust the price point of these products to be more competitive in the Soda Soft Drinks category.
Results
After three months of executing the new strategy and launching multiple new products in the Amazon Marketplace, Reed’s and Virgil’s had their first real taste of success online. By optimizing listings for conversion, controlling price, and further driving brand awareness, Real Ginger Ale―a top product―had $24K in sales while Zero Sugar Soda experienced sales topping $60K with a healthy conversion rate of 6%.
Overall, the well-designed product detail pages in the Amazon Marketplace did an excellent job of providing sound conversions and sales. In just under 90 days, there was over $100K in combined monthly sales for these optimized products. Zero Sugar Soda ranked in the top 100 of the Soda Soft Drinks category and Reed’s ginger ale products organically ranked at page one on Amazon for all highly competitive search terms for ginger ale and ginger beer. During this time, Reed’s also had a corresponding increase in its stock price too.
SellerSlice aims to make the world a better place and believe it starts with your brand. They look forward to growing with you and getting the results you deserve.
