BalsAM Hill Case STudy

Project Overview

As the Associate Creative Director of Global Brand at Balsam Hill, I led a comprehensive brand overhaul to bring more emotional resonance, clarity, and joy to the holiday experience. From strategy to execution, I guided the visual and messaging transformation across global markets and customer touchpoints.

The Challenge

The business needs to increase customer acquisition, double conversion rates, and drive higher average order value.

At the start of the project, Balsam Hill’s brand identity had become disconnected from its audience. The tone felt overly transactional—lacking warmth, emotional storytelling, or differentiation across channels. Visuals and voice didn’t reflect the joy of the season or the premium craftsmanship of the products. Additionally, messaging lacked geographic relevance and customer education around key purchase drivers like quality, realism, and setup ease.

  • Develop a global first strategy

  • Build a roadmap beyond the holiday season

  • Partner with UX/UI, Marketing, Partnership, B2B teams to set new initiatives

Research and Insight

To rebuild emotional connection and strengthen brand trust, we partnered with our Research team to run segmented studies across six key markets: the US, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Our goal was to deeply understand what drives holiday purchases—and how to improve marketing performance across channels and geographies.

  • Explored when customers begin shopping, what drives them, and which content formats—imagery, messaging, video, infographics—build trust and inspire action.

  • Built customer personas to guide segmentation, creative direction, and journey mapping.

  • Identified three key messaging paths:

    • Promotional: Emotion-led content designed to spark desire and showcase seasonal transformation.

    • Educational: Trust-building content highlighting craftsmanship, realism, innovation, and ease of setup.

    • Storytelling: Narrative-driven messaging that deepens emotional connection and evokes holiday meaning.

  • Applied insights to shape segmented creative across email, site, and paid media—tailored by market, funnel stage, and purchase drivers.

  • Supported the business goal of reducing send volume and cost while increasing engagement through high-performing content.

 

Built out high level visual seasonal cadence, with storytelling concepts, look and feel, hook and urgency messaging, and promotional commercial events for each geographical region.

 

The Strategy

Develop evergreen toolkits anchored in key brand pillars—Realism, Innovation, Tree for Every Space, Convenience, and Quality—designed to scale across regions and channels.

  • Introduce “brand definers” content blocks to reinforce our value proposition and create consistent messaging opportunities across the homepage and global geos.

  • Shift from catalog-style showcasing to benefit-driven storytelling, connecting customers to what our trees truly offer—joy, ease, elegance, sustainability, and meaning.

  • Take a global-first approach to campaign planning, producing asset libraries and toolkits that translate seamlessly from digital to print, social to catalog.

  • Emphasize emotional hooks over technical overload—bringing heart to our messaging and helping customers connect personally to our products.

 

Results & Impact

We brought this vision to life across the full customer journey:

  • Refresh the look & feel of key touchpoints including the homepage, PLPs, PDPs, blog, email, SMS, display, PPC, catalog, packaging, outlet, pop-ups, and B2B.

  • Create an integrated experience that bridges catalog to digital, delivering a seamless discovery journey.

  • Produce photography, video, and motion graphics that live across site, social, and paid campaigns—infusing storytelling with both education and inspiration.

  • Deliver personalized experiences through segmented toolkits and localized messaging.

  • Develop strategic resource decisions for creative brief scoping—bucketing deliverables by effort into NEW vs. REFRESH vs. REUSE to maximize team efficiency and creative impact.

  • 60+ unique campaigns/year, averaging 200+ assets each

  • 980+ deliverables created for Black Friday alone

  • +54% YoY lift in conversion rate and +22% growth in mobile orders

  • +45% increase in creative efficiency through agile restructuring

  • Strengthened brand equity and customer trust via segmented education and emotional storytelling

  • Achieved deeper audience engagement through segmented content
    and refreshed storytelling, driving an +8% increase in brand awareness.

  • +26% conversion rate YoY

  • +69% increase in organic social engagement YoY.

improving efficiency by 55%, and increasing annual creative output by 60%.

Campaign creative tailored by region, informed by customer insights.

Using geo-specific data on seasonality, product preferences, and content performance, we curated three distinct visual approaches. US audiences responded best to bold, promotional graphics and motion-led assets, while UK customers preferred lifestyle imagery showcasing product use in context. Australia required a hybrid approach aligned with their seasonal timing and visual preferences.

 

Visual overview of campaign assets presented in Figjam during “Walk the Wall” meetings to align cross-functional leads on deliverables, timelines, and channel rollout.