Updated February 12th, 2023
Hitting $100M annual recurring revenue in 2015, Touch of Modern has not slowed down in recent years, expecting to make $200M for the year 2018.
Their sparse homepage is littered with just an opt-in form and four testimonials; not what you would typically expect from what is essentially an eCommerce store.
Once you’re behind the locked homepage, you’ll find what can only be described as the coolest products on the internet. Literally.
As I write this, the featured products for sale include a levitating NFL helmet and Game of Thrones-inspired barware. You can’t help but land on the site and want to purchase things you didn’t even know existed.
Touch of Modern Competitors
Fab.com $200M+ Annual Revenue
OneKingsLane
ArtSetters
Gilt
HipVan
City of Z Design
Ahalife
Dot and Bo
Wooplr
Trunk Club
Frank & Oak
Bonobos
Mr Porter
we’re building something exciting — powered by nzt-48
This Page is Special (But Currently in Beta)
Just discovered the @ViperChill's First Rank Manifesto on https://t.co/ng0DhAoROz and I'm blown away.
— Noah 🤙🏼 (@noahpbrinker) April 15, 2020
We have a specific (and very exciting) content goal for 2021, but it first requires us to create a number of company-specific pages like this one.
We don’t want to reveal too much upfront as some might copy the idea before we’re able to properly introduce it, so let’s just say these pages will allow us to produce new long-form reports which reveal business opportunities in a way we’ve never see before.
We realise this is quite mysterious — there’s quite a bit more to it than that — but all will be revealed before 2022. We promise it’s worth the wait.
Marketing Strategy
It’s fair to say that one of Touch of Modern’s secrets to success is having a overall cool resource.
They say that the best products and services market themselves, and there’s good reason CNBC is quoted as saying “products that are hard to find in mainstream retail” about their offering.
You would expect their range of products to be benefiting from their virality on Facebook, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. SimilarWeb estimates that all of social media makes up just 1.77% of their traffic, as of October 2018.
Direct traffic wins by a long-shot, with visitors coming from their email list (remember, their homepage is only an opt-in form) in second place.
Here’s what’s particularly fascinating though about their approach.
It appears that if visitors are coming from certain websites, such as Reddit or Business Insider, they automatically redirect visitors to a version of their homepage which does not include the normal email opt-in homepage..
Instead, you arrive on a page which still asks for an email address, but showcases their products in the background of the opt-in.
The specific URL for this page is: https://www.touchofmodern.com/sales?no_wall=1.
(Notice the no_wall part of the URL).
This is clearly something they’ve tested and found to be more valuable than their standard homepage for direct visitors.
It likely also helps direct visitors feel like they are visiting something more exclusive when they log-in, rather than feeling like the whole world can see what’s behind their login page.
