How Living Cozy built a successful ecommerce business by reviewing furniture and household appliances
Founder Ash Read explained how he built up search authority in a crowded content niche.
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Ash Read remembers the first commission he ever earned on his product review blog: £9.37.
By that point, Read had been running LivingCozy.com — a website dedicated to household products — for about six weeks and didn’t have much to show for it. “There were multiple weekends where I sat writing about chairs and bar stools on a Saturday morning and wondered what I was doing,” he told me. He earned the commission when a reader clicked on a link to a bedding brand and made a purchase. “If you break that £9.37 down over an hourly rate for how much I'd put into the site, it really wasn't worth it,” he said. “But it gave me this belief that there was something here and that it could make money. That £9.37 felt way more amazing than receiving my paycheck at the end of the month, and even though it definitely wouldn't pay my mortgage or bills, it really spurred me on to keep going.”
This was back in mid-2020, a period when Read was still pulling information from other websites to populate his product pages. But as his traffic grew — mostly via Google searches — he started receiving inquiries from direct-to-consumer brands to see if they could send him products to review. This not only allowed him to produce his own original content — which supercharged his ranking in Google search results — but it also gained him access to special affiliate links that paid out much higher commissions than he was used to.
From there, Living Cozy saw explosive growth, eventually reaching 350,000 monthly pageviews and $15,000 in monthly revenue. By 2023, he employed an entire team of freelance reviewers and had direct relationships with the world’s largest home product brands. In August of this year, he sold Living Cozy to an undisclosed buyer.
How did Read manage to break into such a saturated market category that was already dominated by much larger websites? In an interview, we talked about his introduction to direct-to-consumer products, his clever use of search keywords, and how he coordinated the shipment of large pieces of furniture to reviewers all over the world.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Getting to know the direct-to-consumer market
Read spent most of his career in marketing and discovered early on that he had a knack for copywriting. After stints at various agencies, he got a job in 2015 as a content producer for Buffer, a social media scheduling tool. As he moved up within the company from writer to editor, he started to amass skills in building an audience, especially through SEO, and in his six years at Buffer he grew its traffic from 750,000 to 1.5 million visitors per month.
During Read’s tenure, Buffer launched several tools specifically designed for direct-to-consumer companies. D2C brands, for the uninitiated, basically bypass all major retailers and sell products directly from their websites; if you’ve bought a Casper mattress or a case of Soylent, then you’re probably familiar with how they work. “[D2C companies] were at the cutting edge of social,” recalled Read. “They were wanting to try our new features, and they were always wanting to push the product and test the limits of what Buffer could do.”
Read grew fascinated with D2C brands because of all the extra legwork required to drive awareness of their products. Most were incredibly adept at optimizing social media ads, especially on Instagram. They also offered up generous affiliate links that paid out much higher commissions than what you would find with Amazon or other e-retailers. In fact, some websites that were entirely dedicated to reviewing and recommending D2C products were generating upwards of seven figures in revenue.
During his research, Read realized that there wasn’t really a way to stumble across a D2C product unless it was recommended to you. Remember, they purposefully didn’t sell through retailers, so you couldn’t simply browse through an index of these products. “The only way I was really discovering these brands was when they would advertise to me on social media,” said Read. “So I started a spreadsheet, and just every time I discovered one of the brands through ads, I would put it in the spreadsheet with a few details like where they were located and what products they sold.”
Eventually, Read decided to release his database online. He had been playing around with a tool called Webflow, which made it easy to build websites without any coding skills. “It was in the middle of the Covid lockdowns, and there wasn't a lot going on, so I put it together over a weekend.” The website was called Home Supply, and Read tweeted it out when he was finished. “It got a really good response. It wasn't like viral, but there were probably like 10 or 15 people retweeting it and several messaged me to say it was cool. And that kind of made me feel like there must be something there and it's worth spending a bit more time on.”
But first, Read needed to find a better name for his website. After plugging in several domains, he discovered that LivingCozy.com was available for $500, so he bought it. With the new URL in place, he was ready to get started. “I kind of sat down and was like, well, if I'm going to build this, I need to get sustainable traffic.” A simple directory of D2C brands wasn’t going to cut it; he needed to start populating the site with real content.
Paywall incoming…
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