Marketing Manager
Restwell Sleep Products
Term: 03/02/21 – 13/05/22
Restwell Sleep Products is a mattress manufacturer and wholesaler located in British Columbia, Canada. A family-run business with over 30 years in the industry, and over 150 retail partners, Restwell is the leading manufacturer of mattresses in Western Canada.
At Restwell, I had the opportunity to coordinate multiple digital marketing campaigns, implement new branding guidelines, and revamped its corporate website.
Becoming part of the Restwell family
Context about the role
Before coming into the position, Restwell let me know that the company had never had a proper marketing department, and that the previous manager had strong expertise in communications but not in campaign development nor branding. Therefore, they were looking for someone who could bring both their corporate identity and in-house brands to the next level and be more recognizable.
With my extensive experience in developing brands, and marketing campaigns, I felt confident that my skills matched Restwell’s vision, and therefore I happily accepted the offer. After a year and three months in the company, working at Restwell has been one of the most gratifying experiences in my personal career.
Projects & Tasks
What I did as Head of Marketing
Steps towards effective marketing
The magic of Tactical strategy and marketing campaigns
Before staring any major project at Restwell, I deliberately created two documents for the executive team, the owner, CEO, and the General manager to review and approved.
These documents were a marketing campaign, a detailed plan that defined the marketing objectives, KPIs, target audience, and a tactical strategy which demonstrated the required steps it will take to achieve the predefined goal of the campaign.
When working with stakeholders, I found it important to highlight how each project was going to be accomplished, the tools and assets required, visual mockups, estimated time of completion and budget. These documents allowed the team to visually understand what I was doing, and therefore successfully allowed to move forward with the any marketing plan.
a much needed update
Restwell Rebranding
Restwell had been operating with the same logo and branding for over 30 years. One of my main goals for 2021 was to bring the company to the 21st century and help them achieve a modern presence amongst its competitors.
The owner had expressed his disapproval for the project, as he did not feel it was necessary nor saw the value of refreshing the corporate identity. However, to achieve this and get the approval of the owner I made sure he was part of every step of the design process, and showed him examples as to how this would benefit his company.
The Importance of mockups
The Steps towards Branding approval
Through several meetings, I provided a variety of brand examples, and the characteristics they encompass. These examples contained descriptors, colour pallets, typography, mock-ups, and logo examples. We discussed the benefits and weaknesses of each example and proceeded on choosing an example that best represented Restwell. In addition, a video was created to showcase products and labels with the new branding. The owner was enlightened by the exercise that he agreed to proceed with the rebrand.
The simpler the better
Logo Refresh
The executive team and myself agreed that the original logo without “Rosie” the sleeping lady was the perfect logomark for the rebrand, as it contained the traces of the original logo while still looking modern and simple.
This decision led to finalizing the 2021 branding guide, the royal blue version of the mock-ups, and pushed us to the second and third step of the marketing plan, website redesign, and changing of hosting providers.
Say goodbye to the 90s
New Website, New Potential
A business’ website is often the first point of contact between a costumer and a brand. Having a well thought out website can act as effective tool to attract and retain new users. With Restwell, I rebuilt their entire website, and optimized not only its UI/UX , but its copy as well. Copy was created and enhanced by using Rank Math, a WordPress SEO plugin that provides industry leading SEO Keyword recommendations and analytics.
high and low-fidelity Renders
UI and UX prototyping
All website projects start as rough sketches made with a pen and a paper. Low-fidelity wireframes, user journeys, and UI user flows allow me to have a broader perspective on the project, recognize any possible obstacle , and whether the proposed design is feasible within the given budget and deadline. In addition, I take into consideration website hosting limitations and security features.
For the Restwell website, sketches were translated into a working Adobe XD prototype where the executive team had a chance to explore the suggested changes. Feedback was provided and the prototype was refined. . Once the prototype was approved, I recreated the design into WordPress using Elementor Pro and Crocoblock.
Making Changes were it counts
Website optimized for Tablet and Mobile devices
Thanks to Elementor Pro, I was able to carefully design a tablet and mobile version of the Restwell website. Each desktop page within the site was alternated to fit three fixed screen resolutions. Components and widgets were rearranged and resized in order to make the UI visually digestible.
However, due to some technical constraints within the theme builder a few components of the website do not appear in all resolutions. When it came to the mobile versions of this website, I decided to keep the design simple and avoid using heavy animations and gimmicky widgets as it might make the user experience slow and unresponsive.
See the difference
Explore the Previous Website
Not only was the original website outdated, it was also hosted through a very small company in Alberta. Their services were acceptable, but we required an easier backend interface, faster loading speeds, and better security features in order to run the new website smoothly. I got approval to transfer our 5 corporate websites to Siteground business cloud hosting. I was in charge or backing up all data from the servers and coordinating all the DNS changes with a web developer specialist we hired to run the operation without any problems or interruptions to our websites.
I made a pre-etiquette hosting transfer document that explain the steps of this very crucial process. I wanted to reassure the team that this operation was under control and all required information was collected in order to proceed. The transfer went on successfully without any hit to our google ranking or SEO.
Pure Energy Sleep Systems | in-house brand
Branding Refresh for Canada's Best Latex Mattress
Restwell’s in-house luxury mattress brand, Pure Energy Sleep Systems went through a brand refresh as well. For this project, I took the role of web developer, and redesigned the entire website and improved its user interface. This is an example of my UX/UI and graphic design skills.
Portfolio of this project is coming soon. In the meantime, browse through the website I created.
work smarter, not harder
Marketing Automation
I streamlined marketing processes by using effective CRM tools like Zoho and Mailchimp. These software allowed me to mapped out specific costumer journeys and create automated emails that would follow up with our clients and customers in a daily basis. These autoresponders alleviated the stress of replying to each email one by one and saved the customer service staff a considerable amount of time.
A good example of this practice were our signup and survey forms in our Restwell, Spring Air and Pure Energy websites. These forms triggered automated emails that welcomed the user into the brand, then once the user has been added into the mailing list, another few automated emails would follow such as recommended products, and “Let us know how we did” surveys. All marketing emails were designed using Stripo, then exported to a CRM platform.
Tracking down our progress
Product Landing Pages
Restwell is the primary manufacture of Spring Air Canada products, a popular and well-recognized mattress brand across the Americas. Within their site, I created a variety of landing pages, examples below. These pages were designed from scratch and made to fit the Spring Air corporate branding. The copy writing was inspired by a feature benefit list provided by headquarters.
These pages are improved version of the other outdated pages within Spring Air Canada, such as, Nature’s Rest, Back Supporter and Comfortflex. The newer landing pages consisted of premade sections I designed in order to make it easier for me and future marketing specialist to recreate such pages. Like the Restwell page, I used Elementor theme builder to for the UI design and Rankmath to further improve the SEO of Spring Air Canada.
Essential sales tools
Marketing Collateral
Spec Sheets & Feature Benefits
I was in charge of creating detailed specification sheets and feature benefit cards for each of our mattresses collections. These documents highlighted the components of the mattresses, and their features. I designed easy to use templates in order to revamped our branding and make it easier for my coworkers to change and swamp information.
Catalogs
Restwell carries hundreds of mattresses and sleeping products. To showcase them effectively to our vendors, I design multiple catalogs and brochures that emphasize their features and specs. I worked alongside the sales and hospitality representatives in order to cater different catalogs for different markets within western Canada.
Rack Flyers | Product Cheats Sheets
I developed product cheat sheets that summarized the features of our mattresses. These rack flyers were printed and send to our retail partners. This document is meant to assist store sales reps by providing easy to digest information that they could pass onto the costumer.
Banners and Posters
Banners and Posters were created to showcase our brand and products in events such as conferences, and home interior shows. I worked along side sales reps to created banners that assisted them on their sales pitch when talking to prospect clients.
Large Scale Print Advertisement
I created specific marketing collateral to support our vendors during homes shows or conferences. Some of these assets were booth stands designs, flyers, and scale large banners. These tools were to boost brand awareness and sales during the event.
Newspaper Ads
I designed generic printed and digital ads for our mattress dealers to use whenever they wanted to promote a product on their region. These generic ads contained spaces where they could add their own information about a sale or promotion.
Planning out the Calendar Year
Scheduling Social Media Posts
Social Media campaigns were planned for every product lunch/refresh, event updates and company news. These campaigns followed a marketing strategy and highlighted target audience, best times to post, hashtags, call to actions and more. Graphics were created using Adobe illustrator and Photoshop then scheduled using Hootsuite, and published in our social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
These digital assets were also available to our retail partners through a digital portal. This portal contained a social media pack with graphics of the campaign, pre-written post description, hashtags, and a rack flyer sheet cheat highlighting key features. The copy writing was done by myself and proof read by the general manager of the company. View copy writing examples below.