Amazon
What if Faust was a pots and pans salesman?
E-Commerce | Graphic Design | Creative Direction
A Cursed Brief:
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 is a race to the bottom. The bottom of a tetanus-riddled ball pit at an abandoned Macdonald’s play place off route 55. The bottom of the river Acheron, good pans rusted and sunk in a creaky punt. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
The task: get a legacy B2B-rooted brand to compete and win in the Amazon Buy Box without sacrificing the quality proposition that makes it worth buying in the first place.
The goal was to limit comprimising Matfer’s high-end feel while playing nice with Amazon’s clunky A+ Content blocking and imaging specifications.
We reached for the omnichannel experience with lush full-bleed banners. Dark steel rangetops and grills point to the live fire cooking and pro kitchen environments where the product thrives.
Copy posed 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), staying true to our no studios/no stylists/real kitchens/real chefs visual values. I didn’t mind losing a little generic readability here. We’re gunning for the 1 out of 100 shoppers who stop to actually look at the food.
Of course Faust wins the buy box. Exoglass utensils doubled sales in units from 2023 to 2024. 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 all at once.
