Customer Stories Bala

With SoundCommerce, Bala has built a repository of in-depth customer, digital marketing, and order data, which enables it to create customer profiles and launch marketing campaigns using its own first-party data. Bala did this in a matter of weeks—not months or years—and for a fraction of the cost of building its data infrastructure from scratch.

About

Launched in 2018, Bala is redefining fitness accessories—including traditional wrist and ankle weights—to combine form, function, fitness, and fashion. In 2020, Bala struck a deal with Mark Cuban and Maria Sharapova on Shark Tank and has since grown into an international movement. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as gyms closed throughout the world, Bala grew by 10x, with $20M in revenue.

The challenge

Bala, a new and innovative fitness brand, saw exciting and rapid success after its appearance on Shark Tank in 2020. In fact, the judges on Shark Tank were so interested in investing that they fought for the chance to own Bala shares. After the episode aired, Bala saw a rapid rise of online purchases that created sudden new data complexities for the emerging brand.

Bala’s objective was to connect marketing and operations data to understand the customer without reliance on third-party data, which is no longer available from Apple and will be removed by Google in 2023. It wanted to look across purchase history, email engagements, demographics, sales interactions, customer feedback, and website activity to understand what shoppers want and where it could improve the experience.

However, building this type of data infrastructure from scratch is a multi-year, seven-figure project—one that is out of reach for most retailers. A customer data platform (CDP) is less expensive and faster to set up, but only addresses part of the problem, because CDPs are a marketing solution and don’t integrate with operations data. Bala thought it was out of options until it found SoundCommerce.

The solution

Bala chose SoundCommerce to help collect, model, segment, and activate its first-party data. Within two weeks, the platform was providing baseline reporting. Within two months, the platform was fully launched and integrated with key retail platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, Amazon, and FedEx.

Using SoundCommerce, what traditionally required four or five different platforms is now accomplished within a single UI. Bala can write no-code queries to build segments for activation or build customer reports across marketing, operations, and customer data.

Key results

Based on insights from the SoundCommerce platform, Bala has released kits for different customer segments—fitness enthusiasts and those just getting started. It can build profiles to understand who should receive which kit offer based on first-party data collected in SoundCommerce. Additionally, Bala identified that some of its most loyal and profitable customers were using Catch, a payment and loyalty platform. To meet the expectations of this valuable segment of shoppers, Bala has added Catch as a payment option. As a result of these efforts, Bala has seen average order value (AOV) increase 30%.