How Living Cozy leveraged product reviews to build a successful ecommerce business
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.