“A very personal experience”: How Bed Threads grew its email database to over 300,000 in four years

Email remains one of the most powerful marketing tools at a brand’s disposal. When working in harmony with other elements of the marketing mix, email can be a potent source of sales; an intimate and personalised conversation with existing and new customers, who want to hear from you. 

Crucially, a healthy email database is an owned business asset and arguably more valuable than any social media following, regardless of its size. But it’s also an asset that takes time to build and one that needs constant monitoring and optimising. 

Bed Threads co-founder Genevieve Rosen-Biller started building an email database for her luxury bedding and homewares company from the very beginning. Together with her husband and business partner Alan Biller, she spent more than two years developing Bed Threads’ first products and six months out from launch, started capturing the email address of prospective customers. Several hundred people signed up in this time frame and it meant Bed Threads’ first product run sold out in a matter of weeks. 

That was in early 2017. In the four years since, Rosen-Biller and her team of 35 have grown the list to more than 300,000.