Our latest Industry Leaders episode is out now with the brilliant Alexander Lodeweyckx sharing the remarkable growth journey of Loop Earplugs.
Loop Earplugs have become a worldwide phenomenon, growing mainly through social media and digital performance. The brand has become a case study in how to scale a brand globally through social channels and Alex has been at the heart of it.
This is essential listening for any growth marketer - let's dive in!
Sorcha: Welcome to the Industry Leaders Podcast. I’m Sorcha O’Boyle and on the show with me today is Alex Lodeweyckx from Loop Earplugs. Now, next time you have a gig or a festival or you’re on public transportation or in the office, take a look around and you’ll probably see at least one person wearing Loop Earplugs. They look great. They’re not those big, bulky over the head ear protection that we’re used to. They’re nearly like earrings when they’re sitting in your ear. Now, I should come clear at this stage and say that I do have a pair. I love them, so you have one happy customer already here, Alex. And it is good to have you here. How are you doing?
Alexander: Oh, that’s just a lovely intro, thank you for that. I’m really good, thank you for having me on the podcast. Love to be here. Yeah, let’s talk about Loop Earplugs.
Sorcha: Yeah, tell us. What is it that you do? What makes you different?
Alexander: I would say, at Loop, first of all we are a global DTC e-commerce company. We’re scaling usually in the last couple of months/couple of years actually exponentially. What makes the difference is we truly want to help people, enhancing their life, giving them the opportunity to control the sound and noise around them. That is where Loop comes in.
We are not just an earplug company, we really heavily invest in R&D, in research, to make sure that people have the opportunity to listen to the right sounds, to still listen to for example people and conversations but just filtering out the background. On the opposite side, we also try to help people focus better. So many use cases that we cover with Loop, making sure that our products are right and a nice fit for them. That’s what makes Loop different.
I think this is a beautiful story to tell: if you go outside and the sun is shining, you go get your Ray-Ban’s and you look fashionable. We want to see it in a similar way with Loop Earplugs. We want to make sure that if there’s too much noise (your neighbors are making too much noise, your dog is barking or kids are screaming loudly), we want to make sure that you feel comfortable. You can put your earplugs in, still look fashionable and confident, hear what you need to hear and live life your way.
Sorcha: I find the technological side very interesting. How does that work? You have some products for people who have noise sensitivity (for example ADHD or autism). How does that actually work?
Alexander: The typical earplug everybody knows is an earplug that just blocks out all sound or as much noise as possible. It filters out most of the sounds. Where we try to make the difference is, we try to also have filters in some kind of earplugs. We do have sleep earplugs that mostly try to filter all the sounds. We also have certain earplugs for festivals that’ll only allow you to hear the voices better, but the harmful bass sounds will get filtered out. It is because we use a kind of mesh system in it with filters in it. That helps to lower certain frequencies and will still give you the best sound quality experience for your festival experience. And it’s the same for conversations, same for restaurants. Whatever you need to do (focusing, conversations, team meetings), we have earplugs for all situations just so you can control better sounds.
Sorcha: The interesting thing about Loop Earplugs for me is that you’ve actually made it look cool, which I think is a difficult thing to do. Your branding is great. If anyone is interested and really could use earplugs, they should check out your website. You’re doing it so, so well. Your branding looks amazing, it makes you want the product and it also educates the customer in a really interesting and fun way. How have you positioned yourselves to find that little niche? It’s a difficult thing to do and you’ve done it really well.
Alexander: The honest truth actually is that as the company started, we had the opportunity to have a community, which was a … community in the beginning. They really helped us to help others, they gave good feedback. We really found a match in that community of people that just want to experience less noise in their lives. That is where it started for us, where we started growing as a company, where we had some traction. We had some people, customers giving feedback on us, our advertising and our brand. Everything evolved from there.
That was a couple of years ago. Where we are right now is, we have expanded so much to everybody. We have earplugs for focusing, sleeping, better studying, parenting,... So many use cases we expanded to. I believe that’s the key to our success; we are so diverse in our creators and in our use cases. That really led to always finding the right benefits for the right person. In the end, what a customer wants is to be helped. Everybody wants to sleep better, focus better, study better. If I was a student, I would love to get more studying hours, just because I could focus better. So, by having these use cases and allowing ourselves to create the freedom to express all these benefits (in different ads and different kinds of marketing communications), we are allowing ourselves to reach out to all these audiences. That really led to us growing into multiple use cases and truly into new audiences and new communities.
Sorcha: And your brand leveraged social media really, really well. In particular, I think you do something quite special in social media. Can you talk to me about your approach there?
Alexander: The approach on social media is quite extraordinary, I would say. We are a really heavily performance driven company. A lot of *media* expenses go to our performance driven campaigns on all channels. I’m talking about Amazon, Meta, and Google. We always want to make sure that we get some bang for our buck. But the big strategy in comparison to other e-commerce businesses, is that we focus heavily on experimenting. We want to make sure that we have a lot of angles, use cases, and products running at the same time. And doing more of the same, actually. That’s how we run lately.
We want to make sure that we have every imaginable use case running, every imaginable angle is running at the same time, optimise them. In real time, we launch about 50-60 experiments per week, making sure that all things are refreshed. By having so much experience live, it means that an experiment for us is a market communication angle. It means that it has a couple of assets, right? We have been scaling our social media mostly through advertising. We used to have maybe 30-40 ads a month live. Now we have a marketing machine built up that launches over a thousand ads a month. That’s a marketing machine we’ve been building together with both internal agencies and teams as well as having the help of our agency TRGT who’s working quite well for us making sure that we have that quantity running.
The difficulty about social media, if you go so fast and you spend so much money, it eats content. It eats creatives. We develop this balance between quantity and quality. That’s where our sweet spot is. Do not think too much about the quality, make sure about the quantity, but also dare to challenge yourself. Dare to think: is this really on brand? Does this really make sense? Is the angle really there? To make sure that you still have the quality level that you want to expect from your advertisements.
Sorcha: How do you build that culture of experimentation in your team? It’s quite a daring kind of approach that you’re taking. How do you build that in?
Alexander: I would say freedom. You want to give your creative specialists, performance marketeers, creative minds all the freedom to actually try and learn. That’s something that is really there in our culture from day one; we give people the freedom to try out anything. That’s the only way to know if somebody can make a really good, creative ad: giving them the chance and opportunity to learn and try out different things.
Since day one, we have built frameworks on what you can test with one of the budgets. We make sure that there is enough budget left for experimentation. That budget scales of course at the moment as we are scaling the company. People are just free to use the budgets, free to experiment. They can create their wild ideas together with agencies, creative teams, designers, partners, copy writers. They make it happen. That’s the biggest part, actually, just giving people the chance to fail, learn from their mistakes and move forward. If you do ten experiments, maybe one or two will actually be useful, you’ll be happy with maybe three that will be good or just break even. You have to make sure that you’re okay with that. I think that is the biggest impact for us on scaling so fast.
Sorcha: Yeah. It sounds like you’re dealing with a huge amount of volume, a thousand ads a month is huge. How do you actually manage that with your team? How do you not get lost in the amount of data you share that’s coming back to you?
Alexander: Don’t overthink it. That’s the first thing. The reality is, you’ll never be able to find all the learnings from the data. I have so many CMOs e-commerce founders and bosses who came to me and asked: Alex, what did you optimise and what did you learn? If you launch so many ads, your learning should be huge, right? And the reality is that you might learn that blue works better than black for example for a month. I can tell you, that’s an amazing learning for maybe three weeks, a month. Then you find something else the month afterwards and then suddenly black works better for you or soft copy works better. That’s the reality.
So, how we approach data analytics is by looking at the bigger picture: what benefits are working? What angles are working? Which use cases are really, really working and growing in certain countries? Those are the three questions that we’re asking ourselves. The use case question, benefits question and angle question. That’s also where our conventions and everything we do in analytics is built on. We don’t really look at ‘this headline’s better than that headline’. We focus more on training our people to understand psychological behaviour and buyer behaviour. We train people to do that, because that’s where the essence of making good ads comes in place. Hopefully they understand that and make a great ad. If you launch a thousand ads, what you care about is revenue, growing as a company, reaching out to the right people. And we figured out that reaching out to the right people means that we need to have the right benefits, right angles and the right formats. That is the vision today, I would say. Moving away from that ‘picnicky’ looking into creative headlines, moving away from all those microtests, because in the end if you find something might work better for one month. We also noticed that incremental it might work better 10-15%, but 89% of the revenue of an ad, angle or marketing communication comes from the concept. It just comes from the core message you’re sending out in the market.
Sorcha: And how closely do your Marketing and Customer Experiences teams work then? Do they work really, really closely together or does your Marketing team just look at your buying behaviour? Or do you get direct feedback from your customers? How does that relationship work?
Alexander: The ‘lucky thing’ at Loop is our community. We have a really strong community. We get a lot of feedback directly from community managers, community teams give feedback quite often. We also work together with a Customer team, they really go more in depth with for example post-purchase surveys. We try to also see if it matches. If we send out some advertisements for parenting, are we actually getting the same amount of parents on board or is that different? That’s also interesting. Are you able to target the right person? You hope that you target parents and it hopefully works. So doing these post-purchase surveys with our Customer team is really, really nice to see. That’s really where we see the most effect.
Of course they also go more into the quality of research. They make a buyer persona for us. They often look into the benefits of the person, why would this person be interested in buying earplugs? What are the current situations that we’re facing? Often, when you’re in e-commerce marketing, you always think about your own product. You start from your standpoint, while it’s so much better to start from what are problems that our potential customers are facing? Are these problems for example that they want to get more energy in the morning? Do they feel like they are not themselves anymore? That might be because they don’t sleep well or have too much noise. That’s where we jump in, right. The core problem, the core need of this customer is then energy. They want to feel more alive. That might be the communication you want to give. Not by saying this is the perfect earplug for better sleep, but it’s about: ‘you want more energy? You want to feel energetic from the moment you wake up? It all starts with having less noise when sleeping’. That’s the communication you do. It’s different.
Sorcha: So, education is a really big part of your customer journey. When you have someone who arrives at your website and thinks they want something, but are not exactly sure which product, how do you help them find the right product for them?
Alexander: What we actually noticed is that our funnel in acquisition is quite short. Or at least it is our objective to keep the sales funnel as short as possible in acquisition. We noticed that old people see our advertisements, they understand the benefit and how we can help solve their problem. They go to our website. About 60% of people go to our home page, apparently. It’s a thing. We try to do landing pages, but we just know that people often want to figure out themselves. So, people go to our home page and just discover by themselves what the right benefits are. Therefore, we have our quiz funnel there where questions are asked like what are your problems, what solutions are you looking for? It helps a lot. We noticed that a lot of people use the quiz, just to get more educated and find the right product for them, for their issues or problems. That’s one huge thing we do. Secondly, together with our Marketing team we often look at the use cases and try to really get them sharp and make them match with what our customers are looking for.
That’s also something you find on our site, use cases why products really match your issue or problem that you’re trying to solve. That helps a lot for the customer journeys. I think beyond that, we rely a lot on influencing marketing, authority. We rely a lot on people just talking about our products. The best way of marketing is word of mouth, people just talking about what they like about it. I’m quite sure that people might see ads and it’s convincing enough for them, but the moment you hear an influencer talk about it, I think is the moment people understand what it’s about.
Sorcha: Like you said earlier, social media is such a big driver for you guys. I see your ads all over the place. I must be right in your target market. There’s huge diversity in those ads. Can you tell me a little bit about how you approach that? How do you get all those ads giving slightly different messages to all your different audiences? You’ve got lots of different audiences. How do you do that?
Alexander: I think the biggest reason we are scaling so fast is by creating diversity. It’s really like one of those hot topics today in the marketing world, Google and Meta talk about. How we approach this, we have our ‘content buckets’ that we try to feed 24/7. Today we have about five content buckets that we use.
The first bucket we use is of course how are we going to get the agencies and teams to make sure we have image content, e–motion content, the typical content you can see on advertisements. That’s one of the biggest buckets we have today.
The second bucket of content we always try to optimise and still try to grow as is now, is influencer content. We of course use influencer content organically, but there are so many easy ways to use it actually on Paid Media. We shop them, use them to make sure that we can launch them across all channels, all countries at once.
Our third bucket is community. Heavily undervalued, but sometimes we do get assets from community marketing. Posts or ads that people made for themselves, just content they made organically shared with us. We request if we can access them, we use them on Paid Media. We do notice that even though it requires a lot of time and resources to find and reach out to that person to make sure we can reuse their content, it is worth it! It’s just so authentic. It’s so real. You can’t get a better customer review than somebody who made you the post or the content that we can reuse.
Then the fourth bucket is going into it more, lifestyle shoots, product shoots and so on. We have indeed our Video Squat team set up who go make content for us together with some agencies. Sometimes we could use c-content from that bucket. So, it’s a combination of us going to shoot content as well as asking these agencies to make the content for us and having an authentic, approved kind of vibe going on there. It’s quite nice, it’s really skillable and also really measurable. So, that’s really cool to see.
Finally, the fifth bucket of content is going into that more seasonality aspect, going into campaigns. I think it’s quite important as a brand to challenge yourself a little bit. Is your brand really on brand? Does the brand need to evolve? Something I actually like to see at Loop is every time a campaign gets launched (for example the Tomorrowland campaign or a seasonal product that comes out), we try to make a concept which is completely different from what we’re already doing. It challenges our identity as a brand to be different and to make a concept which is still somewhat on brand but also a bit daring. Those five content buckets, making sure they’re all running at the same time and all diversity is coming from everywhere, is the goal and key.
Sorcha: I really like that kind of peer-to-peer marketing, you know that kind of customer review marketing. That is just absolute gold dust. Like you said, it’s a bit of work to get it out, but there is no better recommendation than straight from the horse’s mouth, from one customer to another.
Alexander: Exactly. People always script so much, right? You go to the agency, you script everything out and they give you this perfectly scripted thing. We really noticed that even though you’re talking to customers or influencers, give them the tools to make sure that they can do whatever they want to do. Give them the tools to be authentic and real. Often those content pieces seem to perform the best.
Sorcha: Yeah. You can try to be as authentic as you like in a script, but you’ll never be as authentic as a real person.
Alexander: Exactly.
Sorcha: For sure. Are you using influencer marketing when you’re branching into new markets? Is that like the big focus or how are you approaching that?
Alexander: It’s one of two focuses. How I personally approach influencer expansion, new markets, is what I call the holy trinity. Paid Media is one of the things you need, because you need traffic. Organic is quite nice and sure if you have a lot of clout (if you are a famous influencer) it’s really easy. If you don’t have that, you’re going to pay for it. That’s the honest truth. So, Paid Media marketing, traffic is one thing. Second thing for me is influencer marketing. You always want to make sure if you have influencer marketing running in new countries, it creates authority, social proof, it’s good content you can use on a website and on Paid Media. And thirdly, for me is community marketing. I really appreciate community marketing. It boosts people. You want customers to give feedback in a new country. Maybe the benefits are different, maybe their reaction is different. Maybe they’re not expecting that the product will work this way. I can also tell you that one of the big countries we conquered recently was Japan. It’s not an expansion country we were trying to get into, but it’s going quite well. It’s our biggest expansion country as of today.
Japan is a country where we as Loop went into with the original approach, copy paste approach. You have influencer marketing, paid marketing, everything else and that’s it. We launched every use case there (sleep, restaurants, focus and studying). After a while we started noticing that people were commenting about it that for them it’s weird to see on our website that you would use earplugs on the metro. It’s like, “No you listen to music or you use your phone, because on the metro you’re silent. Everybody’s silent, so why would you use earplugs on the metro?” Metros in Japan are silent, but in Europe they are really loud. By only having this use case on our website, people found our product and our marketing a bit weird. That’s interesting, right? Earplugs for metros are not even our best selling use case. Apparently this was a trigger for them to not buy. So, having that real time feedback from the community marketing, customer marketing, customer support and understanding how they experience websites and how they experience their customer journey is so crucial in any new expansion market.
Sorcha: That’s really, really interesting. What other markets are you focusing on at the moment?
Alexander: We’re a global company, so I would say we are active in the USA, Europe, UK, Australia. These are the major markets we’re active in. Japan and India are two markets we have been breaking into since the end of last year. Both are really scaling quite well. India is a big market, you probably know it. So, hopefully we can make it big and make it one of our big successes at Loop Earplugs. Next up for us would be going more into Southeast Asia, there’s still a lot of people there. I think that would be the next step.
Sorcha: What are you thinking about building out your teams? You’re a global head of performance at Loop Earplugs, so what kind of skills and mentalities do you look for when you’re building those teams?
Alexander: The one book that one of my mentors recommended to me to definitely read when it comes to hiring the right people is called “Hiring for attitude”. It took me a while to truly understand it. Hiring an attitude means that you hire people for their mindset and not for their skills. It helps you so much. For the moment we’re also hiring at Loop. I always want to make sure that people have this growth mindset. A mindset to learn, to explore 24/7 and to really do themselves. Growth mindset means you’re hungry for learning and to improve. That’s something I really adore in people, which is quite important.
A second thing for me, is you do want people who are performance driven. I don’t mind people who really have a mentality of ‘I want to make it happen’. That’s something I also really appreciate. Those two qualities are what I’m looking for when it comes to mindset and visions. When it comes to skills, I do think if you’re within a fast scaling e-commerce company, it’s difficult to work with new people. It’s nice to educate them, but it requires time. Especially since we scale so fast - we went from a single man army 2,5 years ago to a team of 225 people now - you go into that route with people that you trust. You need to have people around you that share that vision, have understanding of e-commerce marketing, also you can rely on them really fast and any moment you need them.
Sorcha: As someone who is pushing forward in that kind of fast scaling e-commerce business, if you were to give some advice to someone who is in your position maybe two years ago, what would you say to them? What’s really important to get right, do you think?
Alexander: Hiring is one of the things. Take your time for the right hire. It’s so, so crucial. That’s definitely one thing. The second thing I would’ve told myself two years ago is you can’t do it all by yourself. That’s the biggest learning for every manager in the past: you have a team. Performance marketing is quite easy, right. You can really easily showcase that, that can make you money for the company and that’s awesome. The reality is that performance marketing can only drive you so far. It will only drive you into direct response marketing sales. It will only make sure that you’re scaling into the direct numbers, but to build that brand, to build that brand longevity and to make sure that people are trusting you as a brand, that’s where it comes in and where you need to work together with other companies and departments. That is something where we as a performance driven company were quite isolated in the beginning. To scale so fast, it’s normal to get silos, it’s normal to focus on just that one target you have made up for yourself and for your team. After a while, you need to start opening up and understanding that you can’t do it by yourself. It’s a team goal, working together with the brand team more often. It’s also better understanding what are the things that are playing, how are customers receiving it and really building a company for the long term. That is something we’re doing quite well at Loop lately. We’re going more to brand projects lately, we’re working on bigger scopes. Tomorrowland was a huge, huge win for us this year again. Doing all these projects together as a company.
Sorcha: Yeah. I think you touched something really interesting there. I think sometimes in marketing there’s a tendency to want to kind of distill marketing to numbers, revenue, profit and customers, but there’s a little bit of magic in marketing too.
Alexander: A little bit? I would say a lot of magic.
Sorcha: Yeah. Earlier, you talked quite a lot about giving freedom to your team and I think that’s really important. I think that’s where that magic comes from. It’s from giving people that freedom and that trust.
Alexander: Exactly. It’s also not only trusting your own people and your own team, but trusting everybody else. As you said, marketing is sometimes magic. Why things work, we don’t know. I think people overestimate each other so often. Marketing is something that sometimes hits, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s reality. You have to trust people that they made the right decision and know what they’re talking about. That’s something you can only do as a team.
Sorcha: And also like you said, building in permission to fail. I think that’s really important as well.
Alexander: Yes, definitely. Especially in a start-up to scale up, it’s not easy. In e-commerce, you notice that they’re so focused on making sure that every week they have their profits, revenue targets, etc. When there’s a week or couple of weeks things go down, they go into these really dark holes and go into CTR ratios, look at ads that aren’t working really well. They look at where things are going wrong. Often, it’s just seasonality or it’s something that just happened and you can’t really do anything about.
In the worst moments, it’s just making sure that you focus on the people, making sure that they’re doing their job really nicely, and also allowing them to fail. You have to accept that if you do an experiment, it might fail. It’s totally fine that you might not see the results in the next coming two weeks or the next month even. The goal is always to do it in the end, by a certain time period (for example every quarter) you get your target, but how you get there is up to your team to make it happen.
Sorcha: For sure. Can you tell me, what are you looking forward for Loop in the next couple of months?
Alexander: Oh, a lot. Next couple of months, I would say Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That’s an easy one, right. We all know it. The big year for e-commerce season is coming up. Really excited about that. Beyond that, I’m also excited because we are evolving as a brand. We come from a heavily performance driven marketing mentality which is still there and is still driving most of the revenue today. We are looking into: how do we become a brand? How do we launch products that go beyond our earplugs, for example. That’s also a big challenge. That’s something I’m really looking forward to seeing in the next quarter and especially next year.
Sorcha: Brilliant. Alex, thanks for being on the podcast, really enjoyed having you here.
Alexander: Likewise. I really enjoyed being here.
Sorcha: Yeah, it’s great. I think there is so much that people will get out of that. What really resonates with me, was your holy trinity and giving freedom to your team. I think those are my big two takeaways. Thank you.
Alexander: Cool. Thank you.
Sorcha : That was Alex Lodeweyckx, global head of performance at Loop Earplugs. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode for the Industry Leaders Podcast and don’t forget that you can catch up on all of our previous episodes wherever you get your podcasts. That’s it for now. From me, Sorcha O’Boyle, and all of us here at more2, take care, and bye-bye.