Case Study · Retail · Paid Social
Chantal's Estate Sales
A new house every weekend, and a line at the door before it opens. We make the video that puts them there, and we put a budget behind it.
Who we work with
Chantal's runs estate sales across the north side of the Austin metro. Georgetown, Round Rock, Leander, Anderson Mill. A family clears a house, Chantal prices and stages every room in it, and the doors open Friday morning.
The challenge
The inventory changes completely every single week, and the deadline never moves.
An estate sale is the hardest thing in retail to market. The entire catalog is different every weekend, it exists for about seventy-two hours, and nobody can see it until they are standing in the house. There is no evergreen asset to build. Whatever gets made has to be made this week, about this house, and it has to be out before Friday.
The buyers are not one audience either. Designer purse collectors, jewelry people, Hummel and Jim Shore collectors, comic and Pokemon hunters, mid-century furniture shoppers. They follow the same account and they are looking for completely different things, and each one decides whether to drive out based on whether they spotted their category in the first few seconds.
Then the constraint that decides everything. Chantal is running the sale. She is pricing, staging, and standing at the door. Nobody in that operation has a spare afternoon to make a video, and no amount of strategy is worth anything if it needs her to.
What we did
Four moves, built to survive a weekly deadline.
Locked a pattern instead of a look
Every promo runs the same shape. Open on the single strongest thing in the house, walk the highest-value finds, close on the dates. Because the structure is fixed, the only variable each week is the inventory, which is the only thing that should be.
Let Chantal be the hook
The best lines are hers, said on camera in the house. When she says every Hummel sold last time so she brought more, that is the ad. We shoot around her walkthrough rather than asking her to perform a script she did not write.
Put a budget behind the right house
Organic reach cannot be scheduled, and a sale that opens Friday cannot wait for the algorithm to find its people. Every sale gets paid support aimed at the buyers for that specific inventory, running in the short window where it can still change who walks in.
Stayed on after it posted
Comment the word and we will DM you the address. That mechanic only works if somebody is actually answering, so we run the responses to a standing playbook and the questions get handled while the sale is live.
The work
One promo, one sale. Cut vertical for Instagram, where the buyers already are, and out the door before the weekend.
Original art and designer bags
Cut for the collectors
Round two, same house
The outcome
Every sale now goes out with a promo attached to it. Not a photo dump the night before, but a cut piece that leads with the thing most likely to get somebody in the car.
The feed became the front door. Buyers ask for the address in the comments and get it sent to them, which means the audience arrives already knowing what is inside and where to be, and Chantal is not answering the same question forty times on a Thursday night.
Regulars started showing up for the restocks. When a Georgetown house reopened after the garage turned up more inventory, the promo did not have to introduce anything. It told people who had already been there that it was worth coming back.
Then the ads made the reach dependable. A promo that finds its audience by luck is worth something. A promo that gets put in front of the right collectors on purpose, every week, is a system. The spend runs against a specific house for a specific weekend, which is the only timeframe that matters when the whole catalog disappears on Sunday.
The work became routine, which is the highest compliment a client can pay a vendor. New house, new sale, new promo, and nobody has to relitigate the format. What Chantal's has now is not a folder of videos. It is a weekly habit that runs whether or not anyone has the bandwidth to think about marketing that week.
“Fabulous to work with. I had doubts about using social media, but it's transformed my business, and I'm grateful that DSE Media pushed me to start. I've seen hundreds of new customers from this partnership.”
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