Case study — Decorative lighting

$0 to $4.2M in B2B. One year. Two sales reps.

Lampadom was a regional lighting brand with a healthy DTC store and no wholesale revenue at all. Twelve months later B2B was the largest channel in the business — and not one retail price was cut to get there.

Lampadom decorative lighting installation

$4.2MB2B revenue added

12 monthsFrom first call to run rate

2Sales reps carrying the channel

Results at a glance

New B2B pipeline generated$0 before$6.1M

Close rate27%36%

Qualified leads, first 30 days150+

Primary acquisition channelPaid adsB2B outbound by day 90

Marketing budgetCut to 1/10 of previous spend

Avg. cost per qualified lead — cold email vs paid

Google Ads$365

Meta Ads$312

Cold email$34

Cold email brought in qualified buyers at roughly a tenth of paid CPA — and every dollar not spent on ads goes straight to the net. That gap is how the marketing budget fell to 1/10 of previous spend while pipeline kept growing.

Part 01 — The challenge

The channel they were afraid to open.

Lampadom had already solved the hard half. The product was good, the photography sold it, and the DTC store converted. What the business did not have was a second engine.

Every dollar arrived through paid traffic. When CPMs rose, margin fell. When a campaign dipped, the month dipped with it. Growth meant buying more attention at a worse price each quarter, and the ceiling was visible from where they were standing.

B2B was the obvious answer and the one nobody wanted to touch. The fear was specific, and it was reasonable: put your catalogue in front of trade buyers and you invite them to negotiate, to compare, and eventually to undercut the retail prices you spent years defending. Wholesale done carelessly does not add a channel. It eats the one you already have.

So the brief was never "sell to more people". It was: build a trade channel that structurally cannot damage the retail one.

Part 02 — The solution

Price architecture first. Outreach second.

We did not start with outreach. A weak offer sent to a perfect list still fails, and in wholesale a weak offer is one that lets a buyer resell below you. So we started with the arithmetic.

Step 01

Ring-fence the retail price

We built a trade price list that only unlocks at volume, with minimum order quantities set so that no buyer can profitably resell below Lampadom’s own retail. The trade discount is real enough for a retailer to make their margin, and structurally impossible to turn into a price war. DTC pricing never moved.

Step 02

One buyer type, not every buyer

Lighting sells to interior designers, specifiers, hospitality groups, developers and retailers — and every one of them buys differently. Spreading across all five is how outbound campaigns die. We picked the single segment with the shortest path from first reply to purchase order and built the entire offer around how that buyer already works.

Step 03

Build the engine inside their house

Lists, sending infrastructure, scripts, objection handling, quote templates, CRM pipeline and follow-up cadence — all built inside Lampadom’s own accounts and owned by Lampadom from day one. Two of their people were trained to run it, not two of ours.

Step 04

Ramp on evidence, not optimism

Volume only increased once reply quality held. Weekly reviews looked at one thing: which messages produced quotes, not which produced opens. Everything that did not survive that test was cut.

Part 03 — The outcome

A second engine, carrying the business.

Inside twelve months Lampadom went from no wholesale revenue to $4.2M, run by two sales reps. B2B became the largest channel in the company.

The number that mattered more was the one that did not move: retail prices held. DTC continued to sell at full margin to customers who never saw a trade sheet, while trade accounts reordered on their own cycle without a single ad dollar behind them.

That is the real shift. Paid traffic buys you a customer once. A trade account that reorders every quarter is an asset on the balance sheet — and unlike a campaign, it does not get more expensive every year.

Before you decide

If you are thinking…

"Wholesale will cannibalise my DTC sales."

Only if the price architecture lets it. Cannibalisation is not a property of wholesale, it is a symptom of trade pricing set without MOQs or terms. Set the floor correctly and a trade buyer physically cannot undercut you — they are buying volume you were never going to sell one unit at a time. Lampadom’s retail prices are the same today as before the channel opened.

"Trade margins are thinner. We would be working harder for less."

Per unit, yes. Per order, not close. A trade order is multiples of a retail basket, it carries no ad spend, and it repeats on a buying cycle rather than a campaign. Lampadom’s blended net margin went up, not down, because the second channel carried no acquisition cost.

"Our brand is premium. Wholesale would cheapen it."

Being specified by designers and stocked by the right retailers is not a downgrade, it is distribution. What cheapens a brand is showing up discounted in the wrong places — which is a selection problem, not a channel problem. We choose who gets an account.