Direct starts with the demand map.
The brands that win direct don’t start with a store, they start with a picture: what people search for, in what language, at what stage of understanding, and how much of it there is. Skip that and you build a beautiful site optimised for guesses.
Vita Coco didn’t skip it. Before the redesign took shape, every market got its own native research build, not translations of an English keyword list, but demand mapped in the words German and Spanish buyers actually use. The difference matters: category language, health claims and buying intent don’t translate literally, and neither does the competition.
Three markets, Three different games.
The research read each market’s maturity, and they weren’t playing the same game. In less mature markets, the category itself still needed explaining: what coconut water is, what it does, why it earns its price. The architecture there led with educational content, meeting buyers at the start of their understanding.
Mature markets searched differently: specific nutritional questions, benefit comparisons, occasion and lifestyle demand. There the structure went deeper into nutrition and use-case content, with separate briefs and calendars per territory built to the needs of each. One brand, three markets, three sequenced plans.
An architecture built for the deciding weeks.
A considered buyer researches before they purchase, and a category buyer researches before they even know the brand. The information architecture was designed for both: commercial pages to capture demand that’s ready, and informational content, nutrition, lifestyle, the questions behind the category, to win the weeks of deciding before it.
Over 2,000 pages were briefed across commercial, branded opportunity, nutrition and lifestyle. Every one mapped to real, sized demand, so the content team never had to guess what to make next or why it mattered.
Built to hand over.
This engagement was the foundation phase, and we’re precise about that: Vita Coco’s in-house team took the map and ran, into organic search, content and creator work built on the demand we’d sized. That’s the model working as designed. The research, the architecture and the briefs live with the brand, powering decisions long after the project closed.
A demand map doesn’t expire when the agency steps back. It compounds, every page built from it, every piece of creator content aimed by it, all pointed at the same goal: a global retail brand steadily building direct relationships with the people who love the product.
The Result
The foundation, sized and delivered: a 1M+ monthly traffic opportunity identified across four markets, 4,000 highly relevant keywords mapped, and 2,000+ pages briefed across commercial, branded opportunity, nutrition and lifestyle, each build native to its market’s language and maturity.
The redesign launched on evidence instead of instinct, and the demand map became the engine behind Vita Coco’s organic and creator content programme, run in-house, exactly as a foundation should be.
