Salvo 1968: B2B to D2C in Eight Weeks

The situation

In February 2020, Salvo 1968 was a B2B Italian food business. For over 50 years they had sold exclusively to professional kitchens, delis, pizzerias, and Italian restaurants. The consumer market was not part of the plan.

By March 2020, it had to be.

COVID restrictions closed the hospitality trade almost overnight. Salvo’s entire customer base went dark. The business needed to start selling directly to consumers across the country, and it needed to do so in weeks, not months.

Salvo had an e-commerce platform. They had a warehouse and distribution centre in Manchester. What they didn’t have was any consumer-facing marketing. No acquisition strategy. No email programme. No social media presence built for individual buyers rather than wholesale accounts. No understanding of how to speak to a consumer audience that had never heard of them.

What we did

We were originally brought in to consult on digital marketing improvements. The brief changed completely within a month.

The first priority was getting customers through the door. We set up Google advertising campaigns with a small budget and refined them over time, targeting the Greater Manchester area initially and expanding to London and beyond as the operation proved it could handle the volume. Within a couple of weeks, Salvo were running click-and-collect from their Manchester distribution centre: members of the public buying single-unit items in specific time slots. For a business that had only ever shipped pallets to trade, that was a significant operational shift.

Alongside paid acquisition, we built the retention layer. Weekly product-focused mailers tied to what was actually available (stock relevance mattered because supply chains were unpredictable during lockdown). A full social media overhaul, shifting the channels from trade-facing content to consumer engagement. Daily content creation and community management.

The hardest part was not the marketing mechanics. It was the positioning. Salvo’s team were deeply passionate about Italian food and had spent decades talking to people who shared that expertise. The instinct was to keep speaking to Italian food enthusiasts. Our job was to help them see that the audience had changed. The people buying pasta and pizza products during lockdown were not professional chefs. They were families. The voice needed to shift, and that required patience and trust on both sides.

The results

By November 2020, eight months after the pivot:

13% increase in revenue. Against a backdrop where the entire hospitality trade had collapsed.

22% uplift in e-commerce conversion rate. The targeting worked. The people arriving on the site were the right people.

Over 9% increase in average transaction value. Consumers bought more per order than the business had anticipated.

30% average open rate on mailers. The list was clean, the content was relevant, and the tone treated readers as people rather than accounts.

The speed was the point. Salvo needed to pivot a 50-year-old B2B model to consumer sales in the middle of a crisis. There was no time for a six-month strategy process. Voodoo onboarded fast, built the plan, and executed it in parallel. The business stayed open. The new channel worked.