About

Original Grain crafts premium watches from unique materials that tell a story, like whiskey barrels, military ammo, and tailored guitars. Founded by brothers Ryan and Andrew Beltran in 2013, Original Grain advances the limits of modern watchmaking with an unwavering commitment to authenticity.

Challenge

Original Grain had robust CTR and site traffic — but not enough profit growth 

In mid-2023, Nate Lagos, VP of Marketing at Original Grain, faced an unexpected challenge. With Meta ads and content, Original Grain was bringing more people to their site than ever. Yet they weren’t seeing the bottom-line growth the business needed.

“We’d scaled traffic over 100%, but conversions had dropped and AOV was flat,” says Nate. “We were spending so much on marketing but weren’t growing the way we should have.” 

As a performance marketer, Nate had always been focused on social ads, religiously A/B testing and doing everything he could to pump up CTR. But his experience trying to improve sales through Original Grain’s website prompted him to re-evaluate those priorities. 

“I realized there was only so much we could do with social ads to improve profit,” he says. “As much as we tried and tested our tactics, cost-per-click will only go down so much.” 

So, Nate started exploring the world of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). How could Original Grain’s website itself be adjusted to generate more sales? 

Nate knew experimentation was important to CRO and had tried out ad hoc, informal price testing. Initial results were compelling, but Nate quickly realized CRO wasn’t a magic bullet. The goal was to drive profit, not just conversions. 

“Conversion rate is a vanity metric without context,” he explains. “If I slashed prices by 80%, I’d double conversions tomorrow.”

That’s when he found Intelligems. “Other vendors just wanted us to do more and more tests, with no real rationale,” he says. Nate liked how Intelligems instead offered robust testing capabilities as a lever for profit optimization. 

“Our goal isn’t to improve conversions or AOV for its own sake — it’s to grow the business profitably. Profit per visitor is the only metric to measure that.” 

Solution

Thanks to Intelligems, Original Grain used profit-focused experimentation as a tool for continuous growth

When Intelligems CEO Drew Marconi suggested focusing on profit per visitor (PPV), something clicked. Nate had found Original Grain’s North Star metric. With PPV as a guide, he was ready to try Intelligems’ more rigorous experimentation. 

Nate rolled out Intelligems’ price testing where it would have the most impact — on Original Grain's ten best-selling products. “These SKUs make up a huge portion of our total profit,” he explains. “We knew every extra dollar would make a real difference to bottom-line growth.” 

Keeping profit optimization as his North Star, Nate started tweaking prices on these top performers. Some of his findings were surprising — one watch generated the most profit at $799, even though he’d been positive customers wouldn’t pay above $500.

Another revelation was the power of content replacement tests. “We were able to unlock huge PPV increases on our Christmas sale page just by tweaking a few words in the headline,” Nate shares. “I could not believe the results.”

“You really never know what’s going to drive profit. Intelligems makes sure we test every angle and give everything a fair shot.” 

Results

Original Grain grew their bottom line through profit optimization

With Intelligems, the team now tests rigorously and keeps an open mind without ever losing sight of profit optimization. When they chose to tailor their testing to profitability, Original Grain saw AOV, CLTV, and conversions rise as well. 

• 50% higher profit per visitor from a single headline test

• 40% higher profit per session on top SKUs

“I’m excited to keep working with Intelligems because this type of work never ends. What customers respond to keeps changing,” says Nate. Moving forward, he’ll experiment with different pricing, messaging, and content for milestones like Father’s Day and Black Friday. 

“If the last few years in e-commerce have shown us anything, it's that revenue is vanity. Only companies that prioritize profit will last through whatever the future holds. Intelligems is one of the few things that’s allowed us to grow profitably year-over-year by big percentages.”