CASE STUDY:

Meridian &

Meridian Men

A 30+ year business branches out of Bozeman and onto the national scene — and into the New York Times.

SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING

FRACTIONAL CMO, CONTENT STRATEGY, EMAIL MARKETING, COPYWRITING, AND BRAND DEVELOPMENT

The client

Meridian first opened its doors in Bozeman, Montana, more than three decades ago and quickly became the destination for unexpected designer brands, curated by someone with an impeccable eye — and a heart full of Montana.

In 2023, Husband-and-wife owners Haley and Josh also opened Meridian Men, a sibling store down the street.

The challenge

While Meridian had a firm hold in Bozeman, courtesy of its two brick-and-mortar stores, Haley and Josh came to me with an interesting challenge: Because a solid percentage of their clientele are tourists or part-time residents (Bozeman is, after all, a luxury ski town), they wanted to keep those clients after they headed back home. Could they build a robust enough ECOMM business to make it worth their time and resources? And if so, how?

To do that, they needed a new approach to marketing.

The objective

Meridian now needed a few elements that it had never needed before: a brand voice, tone, and story beyond the visual identity of the stores (for emails, the site, etc.), effective storytelling (the why that would make them stand out in a sea of online retailers), and strategic marketing funnels to keep subscribers and customers coming back for more — even if they’d never stepped foot into the stores on Main Street.

How we did it

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

    consistency in all things

    Staying consistent is one of the hardest things for anyone to get right, but it's especially true for a small business operating multiple stores. Haley and Josh had been sending emails for a while when and where they could, but they needed a roadmap — and they needed execution.

    We started by digging into Meridian’s open rates and numbers to determine what their best send times, days, and themes were.

    Then, we established a set calendar for email marketing, which included a strategy for what kinds of topics to share and when. From there, I began writing all email copy, meeting with the team each week to chat marketing strategy, review final drafts, and discuss the numbers.

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and half circle lines.

    keep it simple

    As Meridian had grown, they’d added numerous flows and funnels to manage the influx of contacts they were adding in-store and online. By the time I joined them, they weren’t sure what was firing and when.

    So we started by turning everything off. Then, we rebuilt just the welcome flow to ensure it told the full story of Meridian in Meridian’s voice. We knew that if we did it right, we’d delight and convert people no matter where we got their email addresses.

    Once we turned the welcome funnel back on, we increased sales from automated emails by 5x — with ~80% fewer automations to track and manage.

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and circle lines.

    a story that reads like luxury

    The best part of stepping inside Meridian is how it feels.

    The staff have excellent taste and are meticulously trained. Haley’s eye is unparalleled. There are shop dogs.

    We needed to figure out how to tell that story to people who weren’t in the physical space.

    We did that through two major narrative projects:

    1) launching a quarterly journal with stories on lifestyle, culture, and taste through a distinctly Meridian lens, and

    2) writing/ghostwriting more emails from the owners themselves, including a new monthly newsletter, “Aunt Harry’s Picks” in Haley’s voice based on Haley’s personal tastes.

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

    SEO with a sense of style

    To compete in the online world, we knew Meridian needed a site optimized for search. This wasn’t about stuffing in keywords related to the brands they carried (in fact, they ranked well for certain niche brands because they were one of the few stores to carry them), but we did need people to find Meridian as they researched their potential winter trips to resorts like Big Sky. We also wanted more people to discover Meridian by chance while researching up-and-coming brands, and we needed to make clear that purchasing those brands through Meridian supports a local business.

    To reach Meridian’s target audience(s), we optimized copy for the whole site, then leveraged the site journal to publish a series of SEO-optimized Bozeman city guides and related content.

The Results

Over the course of a year, we increased email list size by 10x while also improving open rates and direct sales from emails by 120%.

We also launched a quarterly Meridian journal, The Fine Line and a newsletter written in Haley’s voice of her monthly picks — which garnered a consistent 60+% open rate.

In late 2025, Meridian was named one of the top 50 stores in the United States by the New York Times.

  • Testimonial: Haley Connolly, co-owner

    “We’ve worked with Kit for over three years, and she truly became an extension of our team, essentially a fractional CMO. She handled everything copy-wise, from captions, emails, journals, and web content to flows, SEO, analytics, and more. She’s fair and you get so much value from working with her.

    Kit became an idea generator for events and promotions, full of knowledge, awareness, and an instinctive pulse for what the brand needs. She brings an organized process to the table that helped our team stay on track and follow a clearer system, ultimately creating a better workflow. She also has a talented network of creatives she can refer. We genuinely look forward to our call every week to hear her ideas and get realigned and re-energized around our marketing priorities. We can’t recommend working with Kit enough!”

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