MVMT Watches was co-founded in June 2013 by Jake Kassan and Kramer LaPlante, two Santa Barbara roommates who had both already dropped out of college. Kassan had started a clothing and accessories company selling into the rave scene by the time he was 19; LaPlante had launched a wallet brand, Articulate Wallets, on Kickstarter and raised more than $100,000 from nearly 3,000 backers. Neither had watch industry experience. What they had was under $5,000 in combined savings, a Costco camera, six self-designed sample watches, and a plan to source manufacturing through Alibaba from their apartment. Five years later Movado Group, the century-old Swiss watch conglomerate, paid $100 million up front — plus up to $100 million more in earnout payments — to acquire the company outright. The mechanism between those two points wasn't a single viral moment; it was a Shopify store built specifically to convert attention bought in small, cheap, constantly-tested increments.
Rejected twice by Kickstarter, then a record-setting Indiegogo run
Kassan and LaPlante pitched their watch concept to Kickstarter twice and were rejected both times — the platform's vetting process wasn't convinced. They took the idea to Indiegogo instead, launching in June 2013 with a modest funding target. The campaign raised $219,898, more than 1,466% over its original goal, and became the second most-funded fashion campaign in Indiegogo's history at the time. That crowdfunding run did double duty: it validated real demand for a $95 minimalist watch before a single unit had shipped, and it built the first email list and social following the brand would spend the next several years compounding.
A platform that says no forces a founder to prove demand somewhere else before spending real money. MVMT's entire early growth model — test cheap, prove it works, then scale the specific thing that worked — traces back to having to earn its first dollars on Indiegogo instead of getting a head start from a platform's built-in audience.
Why MVMT chased 62 mid-tier influencers instead of one famous one
The influencer strategy that defined MVMT's marketing in its early years was a deliberate rejection of the celebrity-endorsement playbook. Instead of spending a large fixed sum on one recognizable name, the brand reached out — initially by direct message and email, offering free product in exchange for posts — to Instagram accounts with followings between 30,000 and 500,000. In one documented campaign, MVMT partnered with 62 influencers averaging 47,000 followers each, producing 73 sponsored posts that generated over 100,000 likes, 2,800 comments, and reached more than 3 million people in a single week. The economics of that approach are different in kind, not just in scale, from a celebrity deal: 62 independent data points on what resonates, rather than one all-or-nothing bet, and a roster small enough in individual cost that underperforming partners could be dropped without meaningfully denting the budget.
The mechanic that made this compound rather than just generate one-off posts was reuse. User-generated content from influencer collaborations didn't stay on Instagram — it got repurposed directly into Facebook ad creative, email campaigns, and website banners. That reuse is what actually lowered customer acquisition cost over time: instead of commissioning new creative for every channel, the brand let its highest-performing organic content become its paid-media creative too, and let its paid-media performance data tell it which influencer content was actually worth amplifying with ad spend behind it.
A Facebook ad strategy built on volume and iteration, not a single big idea
MVMT's paid social approach followed the same test-heavy logic as its influencer program: generate large volumes of ad variations, run them against different audience segments, and let performance data — not internal opinion — decide what scaled. The ads that performed best shared a consistent pattern: high-quality product photography paired with a short, direct call to action, rather than long-form brand storytelling. For a Shopify store selling a considered $95-plus purchase to a cold audience, that pairing of visual credibility with low-friction messaging is a specific, testable hypothesis rather than a generic "run more ads" instruction — and running it at volume, across dozens of creative variants simultaneously, is what let the brand find its winners fast enough to matter.
Turning social platforms into stores, not just traffic sources
By 2014, mobile traffic had overtaken desktop for MVMT — a reversal from the 75% desktop split the brand saw in its earliest days, with mobile eventually settling around 60% of total traffic. That shift shaped a second, less obvious strategic move: rather than treating Facebook and Pinterest purely as channels that pushed traffic back to the Shopify store, MVMT built in-app purchasing directly into both. A Facebook Shop implementation drew over 60,000 visitors in a 90-day window with a 0.5% conversion rate, generating more than $15,000 in additional revenue — a modest number in isolation, but notable because 75% of that revenue came from just three prominently featured products, evidence that a small, curated set of hero items converts disproportionately well when the path from discovery to purchase is shortened to almost nothing.
Pinterest performed at a different order of magnitude. Over a three-month window, MVMT's Pinterest presence generated 230.5 million impressions, 554,522 clicks, 403,666 re-pins, and 11,071 conversions at a 1.99% conversion rate — a 12-fold increase in Pinterest-driven traffic over the prior period. A Promoted Pin campaign specifically produced a 2x conversion lift along with a higher average order value than baseline traffic. As MVMT's director of marketing put it at the time, a shoppable pin functions "almost like having a new landing page, but one customers can purchase from instantly" — the same underlying logic as the influencer program: remove the steps between someone liking what they see and being able to buy it.
Influencer content, Facebook ads, and Pinterest pins were treated as three instances of the same problem — cutting the distance between attention and purchase — rather than three separate marketing disciplines each with their own team and budget silo.
What Shopify Plus specifically had to support
None of this is possible if the underlying store can't keep pace with the channel experimentation happening on top of it. MVMT ran on Shopify Plus, using its multi-currency and international storefront tools to expand into 160-plus countries from a single backend rather than standing up market-specific infrastructure for each one — the same Shopify Markets-style pattern that shows up in Mulmul's and Le Petit Ballon's later international expansions. Shopify's built-in analytics and reporting gave the marketing team the customer-behavior visibility needed to actually judge which influencer, which ad variant, and which Pinterest campaign were producing incremental revenue rather than just vanity engagement — a prerequisite for a testing-heavy strategy that would otherwise be flying blind on attribution.
From $60 million to a $100 million exit
By the end of 2016, MVMT was on track to meet or exceed $60 million in annual revenue — a figure that had grown from a sub-$5,000 starting investment in roughly three and a half years. Growth continued: in the fiscal year ended December 31, 2017, MVMT reported approximately $71 million in revenue, per Movado Group's own SEC filings. On October 1, 2018, Movado completed its acquisition of MVMT for an initial payment of approximately $100 million — around $85 million net of anticipated tax benefits — plus up to an additional $100 million in future earnout payments tied to MVMT's continued performance, with no minimum guaranteed. Movado funded the deal from cash on hand, planning to replenish roughly $50 million of it through its revolving credit facility. By that point MVMT had expanded beyond watches into sunglasses and accessories, selling into more than 160 countries almost entirely through its own direct-to-consumer channel.
What this means for a brand building a Shopify performance-marketing engine today
The transferable lesson from MVMT isn't "use influencers" or "run more Facebook ads" in the abstract — both of those are now default advice that's lost most of its edge through overuse. The specific, still-useful pattern is the reuse loop: content created for one channel (an influencer's Instagram post) was systematically redeployed into paid social, email, and the storefront itself, so that a single piece of creative production paid for engagement across four channels instead of one. Most brands treat influencer marketing, paid social, and email as separate line items run by separate people with separate creative briefs — which means the same visual story gets told badly and expensively three or four different times instead of well once and reused.
The other durable lesson sits in the influencer math specifically: 62 partnerships averaging 47,000 followers gave MVMT dozens of independent signals about what content and what audience segments actually converted, at a total cost that would likely not have covered a single major celebrity deal. A brand with a limited budget deciding between one large influencer bet and a portfolio of smaller ones should weigh not just the reach difference, but the information difference — a portfolio approach produces a testing dataset a single big bet never can, and that dataset is what let MVMT's Facebook ad team know which creative to scale before spending real money finding out the hard way.
About this case study.
Did Carryup work with this brand?
No — Carryup did not work with MVMT Watches. This is independent analysis of publicly available information (official case studies, press coverage, and reported figures — see the sources cited on this page), written to extract lessons transferable to other Shopify D2C brands. Our own client work lives on the Work page, with real, attributable results.
Does this apply if my brand is a different size or category?
The underlying mechanics — infrastructure readiness, retention systems, platform fit — are largely category-agnostic. The specific numbers will differ, but the diagnostic approach transfers.
How do I know if this problem applies to my store?
The fastest way is a direct diagnostic of your own store, tracking, and infrastructure — we can tell you within a week whether the same pattern shows up.
Related reading.
Want results like these for your brand?
Tell us about your store — we'll review your setup and tell you exactly where the opportunity is.