In this episode of The Future of Consumer Marketing, host Roman Kirsch interviews Jacob Westerberg, Co-Founder of JUNIPER, a Swedish direct-to-consumer bedding and home goods brand. Jacob and his wife built JUNIPER from a honeymoon hotel experience into a profitable business that’s expanded from bed linens into towels, soaps, and consumables. Their journey reveals crucial insights about working capital management, founder-led marketing, and the evolution from single-product focus to category expansion. Through strategic product development and performance marketing optimization, they’ve maintained profitability while building a premium brand that commands €200+ average order values in a commoditized market.

Topics Discussed:

• Working capital challenges in inventory-heavy D2C businesses

• Founder-led marketing and authentic brand storytelling

• Performance marketing evolution through iOS changes and platform shifts

• Product expansion strategy for improving customer lifetime value

• Premium positioning in commoditized categories

• International expansion considerations for product-specific sizing

• Marketing measurement and attribution in the post-iOS 14 era

Lessons For Consumer Marketers:

Prioritize Inventory Capital Planning Over Marketing Spend

Unlike marketing budgets that should theoretically be self-funding, inventory requires significant upfront capital that directly impacts growth potential. Jacob emphasizes that expanding SKUs and maintaining broader assortments attracts more customers and drives business growth, but requires strategic capital allocation. This working capital constraint was their biggest oversight when starting JUNIPER, nearly causing bankruptcy after 10 months despite strong product-market fit.

Leverage Founder Stories for Authentic Performance Marketing

Their breakthrough ad featured Jacob’s wife with long-form copy explaining the brand’s origin story, which “caught fire” and established paid social as their primary channel. This founder-led approach builds trust by letting customers buy from people rather than corporations. They’ve evolved this strategy to include employee stories, maintaining the human element while scaling beyond just the founders’ narratives.

Use Retention Metrics to Guide Product Strategy

Jacob tracks customer lifetime value expansion from first purchase (€200) to one-year mark (€300), achieving 15% growth. While this isn’t as strong as supplement or beauty brands that see 100%+ expansion, it informs their product roadmap. They deliberately expanded into consumables like soaps and hand lotions that create more frequent repurchase cycles, taking three years to gain traction but now showing acceleration.

Focus on Gross Margin Dollars, Not Percentages

Most brands incorrectly use cost of sale (marketing spend as percentage of revenue) as their primary efficiency metric. This leads to suboptimal decisions like rejecting opportunities to double new customer acquisition at the same CAC because it would worsen the percentage. Instead, Jacob advocates for focusing on absolute gross margin dollars needed to cover fixed costs, allowing for higher revenue growth that builds future retention value.

Implement Premium Positioning Through Transparency and Risk Reversal

To compete against low-cost competitors with similar imagery, JUNIPER emphasizes production transparency (Portuguese manufacturing, Supima cotton) and offers a 30-day risk-free trial with company-paid returns. Despite this generous policy, they maintain only a 2% return rate, proving that quality perception matches reality and reducing purchase friction for premium-priced products.

Expand Internationally Based on Product Constraints, Not Just Market Size

JUNIPER’s expansion strategy prioritizes operational efficiency over traditional market analysis. They entered Finland first because Swedish and Finnish bed linen sizes are identical, allowing them to use existing inventory. Norway and Denmark require new inventory due to different sizing standards, so they’re entering those markets together to amortize the inventory investment across both countries.

Embrace Incremental Attribution Over Traditional ROAS Metrics

Jacob has shifted from standard ROAS measurements to Meta’s incremental attribution system, finding it more reliable after three months of testing. This represents a broader trend toward more sophisticated measurement including MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) and external incrementality testing that helps brands understand true marketing efficiency rather than last-click attribution.

Scale Marketing Teams Based on Cost Structure, Not Workload

Rather than hiring based on how busy the team feels (everyone always feels busy), Jacob recommends building marketing organizations from a cost perspective relative to top-line revenue. JUNIPER operates with just one full-time marketer plus founder involvement, proving that small, focused teams can drive significant results when properly structured and supported.