CASE STUDY · FASHION & LUXURY · E-COMMERCE

Secondhandbags AG: 400%+ revenue growth, year on year.

A digital performance agency, paid on results — joint-venture partner handling performance marketing, content and Shopify development for Switzerland's first designer-handbag resale shop.

400%

revenue growth, year on year

5+

people hired for the company

1M+

unique visitors in the shop

The situation

Secondhandbags is Switzerland's first secondhand shop specializing exclusively in designer handbags. In December 2020, R17 joined as a shareholder and performance marketing and technology partner — a joint venture, not an arm's-length client relationship. The catch with reselling handbags: every product is one of a kind and sells exactly once, so the usual "list it once, sell it many times" e-commerce playbook doesn't apply. Growing the shop meant solving that supply problem before performance marketing had anything real to work with.

The call

Build the supply engine before you build the demand engine.

You can't run performance marketing against a catalog that doesn't have enough products in it. So before we touched ad spend, we built a purpose-made product creation tool that let Secondhandbags list handbags far faster than before — a supply problem solved with a tool, not a campaign. Only once that was in place did we ramp the paid channels behind it.

The work

Turning a one-of-a-kind catalog into a repeatable growth engine

01

A product creation tool built for the catalog problem

Purpose-built tooling to list one-of-a-kind handbags fast, growing the number of products live in the store 5x.

02

Multi-channel paid media, each channel proven before scaling

Google Ads, Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram), Pinterest Ads and Snapchat Ads, each ramped to profitability in its own right rather than run off a single default channel.

03

Content and Shopify development in-house

Content creation and Shopify development owned end-to-end alongside the media, rather than handed to separate vendors that don't talk to each other.

04

International expansion and a new revenue line

Took the business into new markets and launched a rental service, adding a second way to earn from the same inventory.

The results

Numbers we put on a scoreboard.

  • 400%+ revenue growth, year on year
  • 5+ people hired for the company
  • 1M+ unique visitors in the shop
  • 5x increase in products live in the store, via custom-built tooling
In partnership with R17 Ventures we founded the joint venture company, Secondhandbags AG. The team at R17 took over performance marketing, content creation and Shopify development. Within one year, we were able to increase sales by 400% year-on-year. We really appreciate how entrepreneurial R17 is.
Emanuel Müller
CEO & Shareholder · Secondhandbags AG

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Recognition

Rated by clients. Recognized by peers.

Reviews

5.0 Google 4.8 Clutch 4.8 The Manifest 5.0 DesignRush Excellent Trustindex

Awards

5x Digital Commerce Awards 20x Web Excellence Awards 2x Shop Usability Awards 2x African Excellence Awards 1x Clutch 100 Winner