Case study — Decorative lighting, Europe

Made to order. Sold to the trade. €2.4M in 11 months.

White Gloves makes lighting from marble and brass. Every piece is made to order. That was supposed to be the reason wholesale would never work. It turned out to be the reason it did.

€2.4MTrade revenue added

11 monthsStart to run rate

47%Net margin held

Results at a glance

New B2B pipeline generated€0 before€3.4M

Close rate29%38%

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€410

Meta Ads€360

Cold email€38

Cold email brought in qualified buyers at roughly a tenth of paid CPA — and every euro 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

Made to order sounds like a problem. Buyers hear it as control.

White Gloves had a real product. Marble, brass, made by hand. Designers loved it on Instagram. Almost none of them ever placed a trade order.

The reason was simple. Nothing on the site spoke to a professional. No trade price. No lead time. No spec sheet. A designer specifying a hotel lobby needs to know when it lands and what happens if it breaks. They got a shop.

The team also believed made to order was a weakness. Stock brands ship in days. They ship in weeks. So they hid the lead time and hoped nobody asked.

That was backwards. A designer is not buying speed. They are buying a piece nobody else has, on a date they can plan around.

Part 02 — The solution

Publish the number everyone else hides.

We stopped apologising for made to order. We put it at the front and priced it like an advantage.

Step 01

Put the lead time in writing

Every product got a committed production window. Not an estimate. A date, with a written remedy if it slipped. Designers stopped asking and started specifying.

Step 02

Build the trade tier around the buyer

One price list. Real margin for the specifier. Minimums high enough that no buyer could undercut retail. Retail prices never moved.

Step 03

Ship the documents professionals need

Spec sheets, dimensions, finishes, technical drawings. Downloadable without asking. Architects filter suppliers on this alone, and most brands fail it.

Step 04

Target the firm, not the freelancer

We went at hospitality procurement and fit-out firms. One relationship covers every property they touch. That is where €2.4M comes from.

Part 03 — The outcome

A brand that used to sell one lamp now sells whole floors.

€2.4M in trade revenue in 11 months. Net margin held at 47%, because trade orders carry no ad spend.

64 trade accounts opened. 31 of them reordered inside the first year. A specifier who used the brand once puts it on the next project without a second look.

The made-to-order model never changed. Only the way it was sold did.

Before you decide

If you are thinking…

“Our lead times are too long for wholesale.”

Long is fine. Vague is fatal. A buyer plans a project six months out. They can work with eight weeks. They cannot work with “we will let you know.” Publish the number and add a remedy, and the lead time stops being an objection.

“We are too small to sell to hotel groups.”

White Gloves was a made-to-order studio. Procurement firms do not buy your headcount. They buy a spec sheet, a lead time and someone who answers the phone.

“Custom means we cannot guarantee anything.”

Custom means you control the schedule better than a stock brand does. Nothing is sitting in a container. You know exactly when it starts and ends.