Quantified Growth: Manufactured Finds Conference Success with Vendelux
COMPANY
Manufactured is a supply chain platform that helps brands launch and scale products with on-demand manufacturing and inventory financing. Backed by investors like Google’s Gradient Ventures, the company connects businesses to a global network of over 500 factories, simplifying sourcing, production, and logistics. By reducing upfront costs and lead times, Manufactured enables brands to grow faster with less risk.
The Challenge
Manufactured helps brands finance, manufacture, and distribute products worldwide. To maintain their explosive sales growth, the company hired Karina Maeda as the company’s first marketing hire.
“I had to build everything from scratch,” she recalls. Of all her marketing efforts, planning conferences took the most work. “We were flying blind. It was days of grinding work just to be able to guess” whether a show would be worth it.
“We were doing conferences by trial and error,” she says, and the errors were searing experiences. “Sending the CEO to a dead conference is something I never want to do again,” she says.
– Karina Maeda, Head of Marketing, Manufactured
The Solution
With Vendelux, selecting trade shows is a quantified process that takes 5x less time than the previous guesswork approach. When there’s a specific company the sales team is targeting, Karina can simply enter the company name and see exactly who from that company will be at which conference.
Vendelux customer service has also been a strong point. “Our customer success manager Julie is one of the best people ever,” Karina says. “She hand-held us through the entire process,” showing Manufactured how to upload a spreadsheet of sales targets in order to create a ranked list of shows to attend. “And if something is missing for a conference, there’s a button to click and she gets right on it.”
Karina’s favorite feature is the competitor search feature. With a few clicks she can see which conferences the competition is attending.
“We found some conferences we hadn’t previously considered,” she says. “It’s a huge game-changer.
– Karina Maeda, Head of Marketing, Manufactured
The Results
With Vendelux, Karina and Manufactured are able to take a strategic and quantified approach to conferences.
“We’re doing more conferences now because we’re able to clearly define the ROI, we know who to send, and they walk in with meetings pre-planned,” she says. “It really is night and day.”
In numbers:
- 5x less time selecting & planning for conferences
- 3x more meetings at conferences
- 35% reduction in cost per sales qualified lead
