+38% Revenue. +44% CM3. And a first-ever Black Friday that sold out by 7 a.m.
Built for Movement
When your product is built on balance - literally - your marketing decisions better be, too.
Since implementing Klar in 2025, Head of Growth & Performance Marketing Lise Le Petit has turned what used to be gut feel into grounded, weekly decisions, helping Stapelstein scale D2C across Europe and the US without compromising the values that built the brand.
The result: +38% YoY revenue and +44% CM3, with more to come.
Stapelstein isn't a typical DTC brand, and it doesn't want to be. Founded in Germany over a decade ago, the company makes its products in Germany (raw material from France), pays living wages throughout its production chain, and compensates for plastic use.
The original Stapelstein stone - a lightweight, colourful half-dome - was initially designed for dynamic sitting. Children immediately turned it into something else. Today, it's part of a modular system used by all ages, across nurseries, playgrounds, living rooms, and desks. Products sell worldwide, with DACH still generating most revenue, the US growing fast as the second-largest market, and France, the UK, Spain, and Italy all in active expansion.
More Markets, More Moving Parts
D2C is still a relatively young channel at Stapelstein, and when Lise joined in April 2025 as Head of Growth & Performance, she was walking into a brand with a lot of heart and not a lot of dashboards. The company had watched numbers go up for years and assumed something was working. Until it didn't anymore.
The challenge wasn't one thing. It was several at once: the mature DACH market was slowing down. Expansion into France, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the US required moving budget across regions with very different demand curves. And the team needed to build a performance mindset inside a culture that had, quite deliberately, never really had one.
"We want to be very intentional about where we put the money. Not because we just want to make money, but intentional in the sense that we put investment somewhere and we understand why. And for that, we need numbers."
Klar became the infrastructure behind those numbers.
3 Smart Moves Stapelstein Made to Scale D2C With Confidence
Move 1: Shifting the Weight
One of the first high-impact habits Lise built: a weekly regional budget review.
When France started underperforming - driven by macroeconomic headwinds that had nothing to do with Stapelstein - the team had a decision to make. Pull back? Sit tight? Instead, they pivoted: redirected the budget into an English-speaking campaign on a hunch, watched it outperform, and kept going.
"The success was amazing. So we started splitting campaigns by region and now, every week, we attribute the right budget to whichever region is showing the best Klar ROAS."
It sounds straightforward. But without the right attribution layer - marketing mix model & data-driven attribution at channel, adset, and creative level - it's a move most teams make too slowly or not at all.
For Stapelstein, it became a Monday morning ritual.
Move 2: Finding a New Audience in Plain Sight
Sometimes, the data shows you something you weren't looking for:
When Stapelstein launched their dynamic sitting stool, the initial assumption was clear: this is a retention product. Existing customers would come back for it.
But the data proved them wrong.
Product relationship data, cross-referenced with post-purchase survey insights, told a different story: the stool was primarily an acquisition product, pulling in a brand-new audience. Adults. Buying for themselves.
"We're actually tackling a completely different new audience that we were not reaching before," says Lise. "And they spend more. Higher AOV, higher lifetime value - because when adults buy for themselves, they know they'll use it for the long term."
Stapelstein is now beginning to cluster campaigns by persona, building messaging tailored to this new cohort. It's early, but the insight would have taken months longer, or never arrived, without the right data.
Move 3: Proof at Peak - A €800K Black Friday
Stapelstein had never done Black Friday. Ethically, it didn't sit right.
Then someone had an idea: using Black Friday to clear the very slightly not uniform stock (production-related) that sat in their warehouse, tell an honest story about sustainable production, give customers something real at Black Friday prices. Values-aligned, performance-motivated.
Turns out they were out of stock by 7 a.m. on day one.
Over five days, Stapelstein did €800,000 in revenue. And they could have done at least 50% more if they'd had the inventory.
What made it possible to keep going - to push more stock live rather than pause the campaign - was real-time monitoring of whether the unit economics are still working. On day two, Lise checked the CM3. It held. That single data point was the signal to stay in.
This year, they're planning for way more,. and re-building the offer from the ground up: product relationship analysis, basket size data, and a tight selection of three to four products specifically chosen to convert this (likely more price-sensitive, potentially one-time) audience without cannibalizing full-price revenue.
"We never would have kept running Black Friday without a tool that let us monitor CM3 in real time. Day two, it looked good - so we kept going."
The Results
+39% D2C revenue growth (YoY in Q1)
+44% CM3 improvement (YoY in Q1)
+12% MER improvement (YoY in Q1)
€800K Revenue in 5 days across Stapelstein's first-ever Black Friday campaign
Stapelstein didn't need to become a different kind of company to scale. Lise and her team needed clarity: on where their budget was working, who was actually buying their products, and whether a campaign was worth pushing. Klar gave them that, without getting in the way of what makes the brand a brand.
