Meet Victor Emilson, the e-commerce director gone DTC agency founder

Hi Victor! What is your background and who are you?

I am 38 years old, I come from Jönköping initially where I studied to be a chef and worked at restaurants for a few years before I stumbled into eCommerce in 2010 and at the same time I moved to Stockholm. I am also the founder and CEO of ROIROI.

Tell us a little bit about ROIROI

ROIROI is an E-commerce and Performance Marketing agency that works mostly with DTC E-commerce brands. We offer a range of services, everything from Technical Project Management, Feed Management, Procurement, Backlog Management, and Technical SEO advisory to Marketing strategies and operational Ads Management. We are a boutique agency that delivers high competence and works closely with our clients.

Why did you choose to partner up and let Grebban invest in ROIROI?

I've worked with Grebban in the past and I was (still am) impressed with how you work with clients and the value you brought. It felt like the obvious choice when we decided that we should scale up our company and Anton could take a seat on our board to bring invaluable knowledge to us. There are multiple synergies between Grebban and ROIROI that I believe are valuable for us both in our future growth. We also share a bunch of clients and we have similar values which are important for me personally. However, we're still an independent agency that works with a lot of different partners apart from Grebban.

You've been working with DTC and e-commerce for a long time. What are some of the key trends you're seeing right now in DTC and e-commerce?

In general, the trend of brands heavily discounting to stimulate growth will continue for some time, but not for the same reasons as before. Now it's a matter of survival for some companies that sit on massive overstock and need to free up cash to be able to pay the bills. But with that said, boosting sales with discounts, in general, is something I think needs to change going forward, brands need to be smarter to create growth if they wanna last and create true brand equity.

Loyalty programs are also a massive trend that I'm seeing since many companies try to increase CLV, but I do see the same attempts here, using discounts and points through transactional loyalty programs to create "loyalty". That's not how to build true loyalty, and in fact - the brands that have the most loyal customers and are growing the fastest don't do discounts and don't have transactionally based loyalty programs. They focus on bringing value to the customer in alternative ways without discounting.

ROIROI is also working with digital marketing, what are some of the key tactics or strategies that brands should consider in 2023?

• Go global - it will help you spread the risk and be less dependent on a few markets. But don't go crazy, one step at a time with a data-driven approach is best.
• Move towards a more holistic view of your marketing spend and its impact - don't look at channels in an isolated view. Instead, you should look at ACoS to have a more fair view of your performance marketing = Don't try to find the holy grail and implement extremely complex (and expensive) attribution models.
• Really get to learn your customers and what drove their purchase, and more importantly, not to purchase from you.
• Lastly, focus on profitability & incrementality

What (non-fiction) book or article do you recommend Grebban's followers to read?

I have two that I recommend: Switch by Chip & Dan Heath, and Mindset by Carol S. Dweck