Fairing’s flexibility has made it an essential part of our tech stack. As priorities switch, or we want to run a new experiment with our product line, we’re easily able to validate all of that with customer insights in Fairing so we know what’s working and what isn’t.

For Tortuga, charting your own course just kind of comes with the territory—both in travel and in business.

Originally conceived as a side project of Fred Perrotta and his co-founder Jeremy Michael Cohen, the travel brand was founded in 2010 with a mission to never let another traveler's trip be ruined by bad luggage.

Tortuga launched as one of the first brands devoted specifically to carry-on-sized travel backpacks —and this trailblazing spirit carried over to their marketing approach, too.

The Challenge

• As a small bootstrapped company, Tortuga turned to organic channels to grow scrappily early on instead of relying on ads like most DTC companies
• They found great success WoM and affiliate marketing—but found it difficult to quantify which articles, reviewers, and creators actually influenced purchases
• Tortuga needed a way to validate traffic data with direct-from-consumer data to better understand the ROI of their marketing channels

“We started before the big DTC boom, so we didn’t have the playbook to effectively run a big paid digital ads program because the playbook didn’t exist yet,” said Perrotta. “We just tried a little bit of everything.”

This included tinkering with some Google Ad spend (as Perrotta recounts: “Our very first bag was ugly and off-putting to people, so our bounce rates weren’t good”) before eventually finding success in scrappier organic tactics like content marketing, affiliate marketing, and WoM referrals during the early days of the travel blogging trend.

While these tactics proved successful in bringing Tortuga to profitability and differentiating their brand, it was difficult to attribute exactly what was driving purchases—a key concern for a growing team that couldn’t afford to have dollars go to waste.

“Google Analytics might say they originally came from a blog post, but maybe the last touch that actually pushed them to purchase a comparison guide from an affiliate, or an endorsement from a YouTuber they trusted,” said Perrotta.

“We didn’t have a good way of gleaning insights on how our customers were finding out about us, especially when that activity was happening offline.”

The Solution

• Tortuga partnered with Fairing to build an always-on stream of customer insights
• By building a pipeline for zero-party data, Tortuga could confidently attribute purchases to their source and make informed optimizations to its site
• Tortuga also used Fairing’s Question Stream™ to identify advantages over competing products so they could double down on their strengths

Tortuga turned to post-purchase questions within Fairing to build a wellspring of always-on zero-party data on how and why their customers were buying their bags. This enabled Tortuga to better balance their marketing efforts towards high ROI channels and tactics.

In building out their Question Stream™, Tortuga focused on questions targeted at understanding how customers were finding them, what considerations were causing customers to choose Tortuga over competitors, and how they might optimize their site accordingly.

Explore the module below for more insights into how Tortuga structured its Question Stream™ within Fairing:

Tortuga's Favorite Fairing Question

We invested a lot of time into our blog, and had our suspicions that even though it was driving a lot of traffic, it wasn’t moving people down the funnel and meaningfully impacting purchases. We wanted this self-reported source of zero-party data to supplement our GA data so we could see what was actually driving business, and this question was critical.

Since launching their post-purchase “how did you hear about us?” Question Stream™ within Fairing, the Tortuga team has seen some astonishing results that are driving real impact within their attribution, CRO, and research efforts:

The Results

• After seeing only 1% of customers report hearing about Tortuga from the blog, the brand moved resources from SEO to high-performing store pages and affiliate content instead
• Fairing data showed affiliates and influencers producing more customers (49%) than was reported by Google Analytics (31%), prompting Tortuga to initiate affiliate product seeding
• Tortuga discovered that 20% of their customers came from offline referrals like Word of Mouth

Since launching their post-purchase “how did you hear about us?” Question Stream™ within Fairing, the Tortuga team has seen some astonishing results that are driving real impact within their attribution, CRO, and research efforts:

Reviewing and Reducing their Investment in Organic SEO

Although blog content had been Tortuga’s bread and butter for years, Fairing data showed only about 1% of customers actually first heard about Tortuga from their blog.

At the time, the brand was focused on driving a lot of traffic from the blog and investing heavily in driving more.

Since then, Tortuga has gone from spending nearly 100% of its marketing time and budget on the blog to about 10%—choosing now to invest in store page SEO and affiliate content instead.

Doubling-down on Affiliates and Influencers

While Google Analytics showed 31% of Tortuga’s business coming from affiliate or influencer referrals, responses direct from the customers themselves in Fairing showed that affiliate content was actually driving 49% of business—uncovering a huge blind spot in GA’s data that was missing the source of nearly a fifth of Tortuga’s revenue.

“We were seeing names of a lot of YouTubers in particular pop up, with a handful of backpack review creators driving an outsized portion of purchases,” said Perrotta. “It became clear this was a channel we were perhaps overlooking and needed to put more effort into supporting.”

• As a result of having better data around affiliate content’s contribution to their business, Tortuga formalized a process for seeding new product samples and suggested brand messaging points to product reviewers in advance—going from sending a couple of sample packages per launch (if any) to sending out 15-20 packages.
• As a result of this increased focus on affiliate content, Tortuga was able to grow affiliate sales by 74% YoY.

Finding Growth in Friends and Family Referrals

Customer responses in Fairing showed that almost 20% of customers were referred to Tortuga by a family member or friend. Meanwhile, Google Analytics didn’t show any of this offline, word-of-mouth activity.

This data is helping Tortuga optimize the pricing strategies and promotions it makes available on its site—such as running bundled packages enabling people to buy two bags at once for themselves and a travel buddy.

Informing Future Product Development

Fairing data is also playing an active role in Tortuga’s future product development, by giving their customers a voice into which travel-focused products they want to see next—and arming the Tortuga team with the insights they need to win repeat customers.

“Now that we’re doing more accessories, figuring out how to cross-sell and bundle and see how people want to buy, Fairing is helping us formulate next year’s product development plans around a better understanding of what our customers actually want,” said Perrotta.

Get zero-party insights like these for yourself— start a free 14-day trial of Fairing and see what your customers are waiting to tell you.