Case Study · Retail · Integrated Marketing
Ferreira's Porcelain Tiles
Italian porcelain, sold the way it deserves to be seen.
Ferreira's stocks the Italian mills and designer houses that architects specify by name, and will design, supply and fit the room as well. The material sells itself in a showroom, under real light, in the hand. The problem was never the product. It was everything that had to happen before somebody walked through the door.
Their team is impressive as well as their creative thinking
Agile and Adaptive Approach: Project management should be adaptable to changing circumstances, client requirements, and unforeseen challenges. An agile approach allows for flexibility and adjustment of strategies, resources, and timelines as needed. This helps ensure that the project stays on track and meets evolving client expectations.
5.0
Performance Marketing
4.8
SEO and AEO
4.9
Growth Hack in London
MarkAge360's work has helped the client increase website traffic and improve search engine rankings, conversion rates, ROI, and social media engagement. The team leads an Agile approach with flexibility to the project's strategies and timelines. The client also praises the team's creativity.
Raveen P.
Director, Ferreira's Porcelain Tiles
read the verified review on Clutch
A showroom product, researched online for months.
Tile is chosen slowly, in person, and almost never on the first visit. Everything before that visit was happening somewhere Ferreira's had no presence.
A tile buyer behaves nothing like a typical retail customer. The decision runs for weeks or months, it involves an architect or a builder as often as a homeowner, and it ends in a room with samples on a table. What happens online is not the sale. It is the long, quiet research that decides which three showrooms get visited at all. Ferreira's was strong exactly where it was hardest to be strong, and invisible exactly where the research happened. The showroom carried Italian mills and designer houses that people search for by name, but those names were doing nothing for the business. The firm also designs, supplies and fits whole rooms, which is a far bigger and more defensible offer than selling boxes of tile, and almost nobody knew it. Meanwhile the advertising that was running chased the broadest possible terms, the ones every national chain and marketplace bids on, which meant paying premium prices for people who were never going to travel to West Hampstead. The brand had the same gap. A showroom selling material at this level needs to look like it belongs in that conversation, and the identity had not kept pace with what was actually on the shelves.
- Independent showrooms bid against national chains and marketplaces on generic tile terms, where the cost per click is set by businesses with far deeper pockets.
- The designer and mill names that genuinely differentiated the stock were not being used as the way in, and the design, supply and fit service was barely visible at all.
- Success had to be measured against showroom visits and consultations, not clicks, because the sale only ever closes in person.
01 · West End Lane, NW6 · the catalogue
Nobody buys a floor from a photograph. The job of the marketing is not to sell the tile, it is to earn the visit, and that changes every decision about where the money goes.
Studio desk
MarkAge360 · Ferreira's
One showroom. A whole system around it.
An identity built for the material
We designed the mark and the brand system around what Ferreira's actually sells. Restraint, generous space, and typography that can sit next to a Versace or an Italian mill name without competing with it. The rule throughout was that the tile is the hero and the branding is the frame, which is the opposite of how most tile retail presents itself.
A catalogue that sells the room, not the tile
Nobody falls in love with a porcelain slab in isolation, so the catalogue never asks them to. It is built as a guide to getting a bathroom right: defining a style, paying attention to grout and layout, lighting the room, finishing it properly, then caring for it. The tile is present on every page and named on none of the covers. One spread carries a finished Brondesbury Park project, designed, supplied and fitted by Ferreira's, which is the strongest argument the business has and was not being made anywhere.
Search organised around the names people actually type
We rebuilt the search approach around brand and material intent instead of generic volume. Somebody searching a specific mill, a designer house, a finish or a format is far further down the decision than somebody searching for tiles, and there is far less competition standing in front of them. That is where the content and the optimisation went.
Paid media on the product, not the category
Google Ads and Google Shopping ran off a properly structured product feed, so the advertising showed the actual range rather than a category page. Audiences were tailored to the real buyer for this product, which is a narrower and more specific person than a broad tile audience, and the budget followed them rather than the widest possible reach.
Measured to the visit, not the click
We held the programme to showroom appointments and consultations, because that is the only step that predicts revenue in this business. Tracking the enquiry and the booked visit rather than traffic is what let us keep cutting spend on terms that looked busy and delivered nobody through the door.
Seven back for every one spent.
Over two years the paid programme returned 7:1 on advertising spend. Just as usefully, the cost of winning a showroom consultation came down, and Ferreira's estimate that this made each consultation roughly 15% more profitable, because the same visit was being bought for less.
The compounding came from the parts working together rather than from any single channel. Search brought people in on the names they were already researching, which meant paid media did not have to buy that attention twice. The catalogue and the identity meant that when somebody did arrive, in the showroom or on a screen, the business looked like what it was selling. Running brand, search and paid media as one system for two years is what made that possible, and it is not something a campaign achieves in a quarter.
What we delivered.
Brand IdentityCreative SystemsSEOPaid MediaGoogle ShoppingAudience Strategy
- Logo design and full brand identity system
- Brand guidelines: palette, typography and layout rules
- Product catalogue design and art direction
- Product and material photography direction
- SEO strategy built on brand, mill and material intent
- On-page optimisation and content structure
- Google Ads strategy, build and ongoing management
- Google Shopping feed structure and management
- Tailored audience segments for a considered purchase
- Conversion tracking against showroom appointments
- Ongoing performance reporting and budget reallocation
- Integrated campaign planning across brand and performance
Selling something considered, to people who research first?
High-value products with long decision cycles reward businesses that treat brand, search and paid media as one system instead of three line items. If that sounds like what you sell, we should talk about how the parts fit together.
