Case study · Capital Iron
£150k across four channels
Marketing Manager at Capital Iron, a three-store home and hardware retailer in Victoria, Canada.
01The problem
Capital Iron was an 85-year-old institution with three stores and a marketing operation run on habit. Ads were booked the way they had always been booked, and everything was print and radio; nothing went to digital. Vendor co-marketing money, which manufacturers set aside every year to fund retailer advertising, went largely unclaimed, and little of how the department worked was written down.
02What I did
I led the three-person marketing team and managed a £150k annual budget across print, radio, social media, and digital. I moved around $25,000 CAD of that budget out of print and radio and into digital: online ads and pay-per-click the business had never run before.
I rebuilt the advertising pipeline. Buyers submitted products through a structured form I designed, with image standards, deadlines, and a vendor-funding check on every single ad. What had been an ad-hoc email chain became a system anyone could run. I owned the copy too: buyers submitted the products, and I decided what the adverts said.
I produced the Fall and Winter catalogue. The previous year's ran 24 pages to around 25,000 homes; I cut it to sixteen pages and more than doubled the reach, with 57,000 copies distributed across the city through newspapers and residential delivery. I wrote the product copy, managed the production, and built a per-page cost model so vendor funding could be claimed back on shared pages.
The vendor money became a system of its own. I tracked every claim against every manufacturer's programme, prorated each ad by the space a brand occupied, and chased what was owed. The centrepiece was an in-store promotional event with a fireplace manufacturer: newspaper advertising, tens of thousands of flyers, four radio stations, and a stand at the Victoria Home Expo, with the vendor funding much of it through co-marketing.
I also organised the company's presence at consumer events end to end, negotiating stand space, arranging transport of stock and equipment, organising staffing, and attending in person. Alongside that sat media partnerships, work with PR agencies on content, and the placements that came from both.
03The results
Print spend fell 20% year on year with return maintained. Money claimed back from vendors more than doubled, rising from 5% to 12% of advertising spend.
When I left, the department had a manual: every process, deadline, and supplier arrangement documented, so the work carried on without me.
The catalogue and the adverts from these campaigns are on the writing samples page.