Southern Scholar Launches 22 Funnel Experiments in 4 Months, Achieving 111% AOV Lift and 39% CPA Reduction

Learn how Southern Scholar transformed their customer acquisition strategy and skyrocketed profitable scaling efforts by implementing strategic bundle offerings in FERMÀT shopping experiences.

ABOUT

Southern Scholar, launched in 2015 by Kevin Wohlman with just $800 in capital, has evolved from a subscription-only sock club into a thriving direct-to-consumer brand. Their premium men's dress socks feature a custom-built ribbed cuff and signature material blend, earning loyal customers worldwide. Initially focused solely on their Sock of the Month Club, the brand has since expanded to offer both one-time purchases and subscription options.

CHALLENGE

Despite offering premium products, Southern Scholar struggled to scale profitably due high acquisition costs, lower average order values and consequently a low return on ad spend for first time customers.

Southern Scholar’s performance marketing agency, Kynship, identified significant hurdles in achieving profitable growth. The brand's practice of directing all ad traffic to general collection pages was yielding disappointing conversion rates, and this compounded with low average order value, making it challenging to achieve profitable customer acquisition. This situation was further complicated by their heavy reliance on seasonal promotions for revenue generation, creating unstable growth patterns throughout the year. 

Kynship identified that Southern Scholar needed a solution that would allow them to experiment with and optimize their post-click shopping experience. In particular, they needed to develop and test new customer acquisition offers that could scale effectively throughout the year.

STRATEGY

FERMÀT’s platform enabled the Southern Scholar and Kynship teams to quickly experiment with new post-click customer acquisition strategies. The launch of dedicated funnels centered on strategic bundle offerings led to dramatic improvements in both CVR and AOV.

Impressively, Southern Scholar & Kynship’s first major experiment with FERMÀT was a tremendous success – launching bundle-focused new customer acquisition funnels – and they’ve continued to optimize this experiment in order to maximize its effectiveness. 

Here is how they’ve achieved such incredible results:

1. Implementing Strategic Bundle Offerings: Through collaborative analysis with the FERMÀT and Kynship teams, Southern Scholar identified that their previous approach of directing shoppers to general collection pages was creating significant decision fatigue. Customers who clicked through ads often struggled to locate the specific socks they'd seen advertised, leading to abandoned sessions. In response, the team revised and simplified their bundling strategy, refocusing bundles on color coordination. Working with Kynship, they produced extensive new photography assets showcasing these carefully curated bundles. The team created four distinct offerings—The Blue Bundle, The Green Bundle, The Purple Bundle, and The Tan Bundle—each receiving its own dedicated shopping experience. These experiences were meticulously designed to showcase the advertised bundle as the hero product while strategically presenting complementary bundles in a curated product grid below. This approach not only simplified the decision-making process but also encouraged multi-bundle purchases, effectively doubling both conversion rates and average order value.
2. Converting Stock Issues Into Opportunities: The overwhelming success of the bundling initiative presented an unexpected challenge when several best-selling bundles sold out completely (4x if we’re being honest). Rather than allowing this to hamper their momentum, the team developed an innovative pre-order strategy. Out-of-stock messaging was replaced with engaging pre-order calls to action. This approach invited customers to secure their place in line for the next sock release. Through continuous optimization of the pre-order experience, the team not only maintained their impressive conversion rates but outperformed the resulting CVR when the bundles were in stock! This success demonstrated that with the right messaging and user experience, inventory constraints could be turned into a source of urgency and excitement for Southern Scholar’s customers.
3. Expanding Into Holiday-Specific Offerings: Building on their ongoing bundle-driven success, Southern Scholar developed limited-edition holiday bundles that capitalized on seasonal shopping behaviors while maintaining the core principles that had made their initial bundle experiment successful. These holiday offerings were carefully crafted to balance gift-giving appeal with attractive limited-time promotional pricing and were merchandised within unique FERMÀT funnels that emphasized both the special-edition nature of the offerings and their time-sensitive availability. This strategic expansion of their bundle approach proved particularly effective during key shopping periods, driving significant increases in both conversion rates and average order value during critical revenue-generating seasons.
4. Integrating FERMÀT Into Core Website Strategy:The remarkable performance of Southern Scholar's FERMÀT bundle funnels encouraged the team to make a bold decision: integrating FERMÀT directly into their core ecommerce experience. The Southern Scholar team added a prominent "Bundle and Save Big" call-to-action button to their homepage. This button directs visitors to a carefully optimized FERMÀT funnel that showcases their best-performing sock bundles, presents limited-time offer messaging, and highlights carefully curated product reviews that expertly speak to customer pain points. Perhaps most importantly, FERMÀT’s embedded bundle PDPs offer a streamlined variant selection process, allowing customers to easily customize their bundles by choosing their desired sock length for each pair included in the bundle. This integration has proven so successful that the FERMÀT-powered bundle funnel consistently achieves nearly 4% conversion rates, significantly outperforming traditional e-commerce benchmarks.

RESULTS

In launching and experimenting on FERMÀT funnels with strategic bundle optimization and simplified shopping experiences, Southern Scholar has more than doubled their conversion rate. They’ve also scaled AOV while simultaneously reducing customer acquisition costs by 39%.

Since implementing FERMÀT, Southern Scholar has achieved a truly impressive:

• 111% increase in average order value, with most customers purchasing multiple bundles
• 122% lift in conversion rate through optimized shopping experiences
• 39% reduction in customer acquisition cost
• 33% improvement in marketing efficiency
• Consistent 14% conversion rate on their homepage-linked FERMÀT bundle funnel
• And a complete sellout of initial bundle experiment offerings, with a successful transition to a pre-order model (since restocked).

The Southern Scholar team continues to work in partnership with both Kynship and FERMÀT. They see the FERMÀT platform as key to their ongoing scaling strategy, proving that post-click experimentation and shopping experience optimization can transform customer acquisition economics while driving substantial business growth.