With 200 years of company history, a clearly defined audience, and the occasional business trip to Paris thrown in, clients don’t come much better than Matfer Bourgeat.
So why would they ask me to do this?
Why would they recruit me to lead this bijou into the back alley knife fight for the Amazon Buy Box?
Amazon: a race to the bottom.
Specifically: the bottom of a tetanus-riddled ball pit at an abandoned Macdonald’s play place off route 55.
Figuratively: the bottom of the river Acheron, sunk in a creaky punt, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
And yet hope holds out. I wish I could say there was some joy in the constraint. But there is n0t. Here goes.
Maintaining Matfer’s high-end feel via Amazon’s clunky and limited A+ Content blocking is a grind, but we’re working towards a semblance of the omnichannel experience with lush full-bleed banners and detailed copy.
But copy poses a unique challenge. It’s easy to fall afoul of Amazon’s copy guidelines, which, famously, are policed by a team of marmosets who chewed up a textbook on US copyright law and then trained an LLM on its shredded remains.
All of our value-adds (product patents, lifetime warranties, and top media accolades) are regularly flagged. A little creative wording is required to stay copacetic while getting the point across.
(Same for the infographics.)
A suite of Amazon-optimized product sizzles are cut direct from our, chef-centric long form video content (hi Lauren, hi Miro, hi Yuri). What we lose in generic readability we hope to gain in visual interest. We’re gunning for the 1 out of 100 shoppers who stop to actually look at the food. That’s our guy, after all.
Was it worth it?
That’s between the client and their god.
But sales are good: Exoglass utensils doubled units from 2023 to 2024 and Matfer’s cult-favorite Black Carbon Steel Fry Pan now sells more on Amazon US (50K+ pieces) than in any other market, e-commerce or traditional, combined.
Plus, all our Amazon assets are easily dispersed to B2B partners to beef up their own online channels, supporting Matfer sales across B2B, D2C, and traditional commercial distribution at the same time.
