FERO Machines

The Making of a Bronco Lifestyle Brand

FERO is the lifestyle brand for a rare breed of Bronco owners who never compromise on utility and style. It started with the iconic skeleton horse and an Instagram page in 2020. Since then, it’s grown to 70K+ organic followers and has become one of the largest independent Bronco accounts/brands in the world. Beyond that, it has garnered multiple 6-figures in revenue.

FERO's story is in a sense, our story because it was created entirely by Pixeldrop's Founder and Head of Creative, Ben Peacock. It's the largest project we've ever taken on, and it showcases the breadth of our capabilities and impact. Keep reading to get a feel for all the strategies and tactics we employed to make FERO a success. You might even pick up a few you can apply to your business along the way!

Logo and Branding

FERO is the evolution of the Bad Bronco brand, which featured a bucking skeleton horse icon. As such, it was critical to keep a skeleton horse, while making it better. What would make it better, you ask? Simplified for better representation on products, more aggressive to fit the brand, and more unique, ensuring it was not too close to other famous horse brand marks. A skeleton logo is not easy to create in a way that it works in small and large applications, and is incredible time-consuming to get pixel perfect. Ben spent nearly 40 hours crafting this iconic logo, and another 80+ hours on the original Bad Bronco skeleton. Every detail is intentional. Some of the key characteristics the logo embodies: aggressive nature, future-forward motion, a rebellious spirit, trail-blazing mane, tattered pirate flag-like edges, and purposed-driven eyes, unhinged from the past.

To expand the brand further, we created a style guide with offroad adventure inspired color palette, distressed, bold typography, and a suite of logos, badges, icons and supporting graphics for use on merch and branded assets.

Social Media

Our primary acquisition strategy centered around Instagram. The play was this:

1. Post only the highest quality Bronco content (create our own AND liberally credit others).

2. Don't post sales content unless there's big new product drop or we're inviting followers into the design process.

3. Post 2-6 times a day, and trust the process.

4. Engage with content creators, Bronco owners, and aftermarket brands through comments and dms.

5. Keep a link to the website in the bio. People who come across the content, visit the profile, and click the link out of curiosity.

6. Use a lead magnet (see below) on the website to convert visitors to subscribers.

7. Send subscribers emails only when there's a brand update, sale, product drop, major restock, or a new video. Usually no more than 2-5 times a month. Because we weren't spamming inboxes, this strategy enabled us to be respectful of people's time, keep open rates high, and gain trust.

The numbers speak for themselves. This strategy worked. The numbers below are actually conservative from sometime in 2024. There were some months that the impressions and engagement were 5-10x those represented here.

The Website

We built the previous Bad Bronco website on the Webflow platform, which gave us full design control, but had relatively limited e-commerce support and customer communication options. So for the FERO site, we decided to switch to the Shopify platform, the G.O.A.T. of e-commerce websites. This change reduced our design control slightly, but gave FERO's customers a more familiar and trustworthy checkout experience, and reduced overall customer support issues to almost zero. We crafted the site to fit the brand, setup the business backend, product listings, packaging, SEO, analytics, shipping details, email notifications, and everything needed to launch and support the site week-after-week. Additionally, we took all of the product photos and wrote all of the copy and product descriptions. If you're wondering what we didn't do, the answer is almost nothing. Check out the site for yourself!

Product Promos

"A product is only as good as it's promo," said someone (probably). We believe that's true. If no one sees how great your product is, it doesn't really matter. So for each product FERO dropped, we built a robust promotion for it. That usually included naming, some branding, description and sales copy, marketing photography, product listing creation, website hero, social media and email promo graphics. Here are some samples of those product promo graphics used on the website, email and social:

Lead Magnet and Email Marketing

You've got to own your audience. So as part of the acquisition strategy, we drove prospects to join the email list. We would rarely sell anything from social media; instead we used it as a funnel to visit the website, and join the email list. Once on the list, that's where we would sell to prospects. What better way to attract people to subscribe than give them a discount AND Bronco wallpapers! Apparently it worked, because FERO's email list grew to over 5,500 subs with a 40% average open rate, yielding tens of thousands in revenue.

There are way more emails than this page can hold, so we picked a few of our favorites to share below. We designed, wrote and dripped all of the FERO marketing emails covering brand updates, sales, product drops, major restocks, welcome drip campaigns and more.

Packaging Insert

One of the customer-retention strategies we employed was to create a business-card size insert for orders. That did two things: one, gave customers a free high quality FERO Exoskeleton vinyl sticker, and two, gave them free shipping on their next order. Customers expected neither of those, and a little surprise and delight goes a long way to create a positive brand connection.

Media Sheet

As FERO grew in popularity, the collaboration opportunities began pouring in, and the need to effectively communicate the brand, the founder, key digital statistics, brand partners and the Bronco build details, all while showing off Ben's photography and design skills became paramount. Now, whenever a brand wanted to work with Ben/FERO, we had an easy way to share the value. We made several versions of this sheet over the years, and Ben used it to negotiate brand partnerships with some of the most respected names in the automotive industry. It was amazing how effective this was. To be fair, most brands sought out FERO/Ben directly, but whenever he approached any, this sheet helped seal the deal faster than a Bronco can get to a dirt patch.

Bronco Build, Photo and Video Production

One of the pillars of the FERO brand is the FERO Bronco build, which we designed to be an extension of the brand and a way to showcase FERO products, brand partner products, and the FERO lifestyle. For each major modification, we did a series of professional photo and video shoots, creating a story around each aftermarket part and install. These videos are available to watch on the FERO YouTube. Additionally, we created a detailed FERO Bronco Build webpage that highlights every major mod and brand involved. We hope you'll check it all out, but here's the TLDR:

If you're wondering if you can replicate ideas like this in your business, it's definitely possible with the right combination of strategy and tactics. We'd love to help make it a reality for you. Just reach out to start the conversation!