Inside Fishwife and Graza’s recent cobrand

Is the DTC renaissance over? If so, it seems like no one told Fishwife and Graza.

The tinned-fish company and the squeezy olive-oil upstart, both DTCs, recently teamed up for a cobranded product, with both brands promoting it across their respective channels.

The product in question is Campfire Cod, a smoked cod tinned in Graza’s signature “sizzle” olive oil (another DTC brand called Diaspora also contributed its single-origin Aranya black pepper to the product, but it wasn’t involved in the marketing push from Graza and Fishwife, per Fishwife co-founder Becca Millstein).

Both brands have been growing like olives fish weeds since they debuted. Fishwife grew 54% between Q1 and Q2 this year, and the company said it’s “on track for triple digit year over year growth.” According to Millstein, it only recently started testing paid advertising via Facebook and Google.

And within seven days of Graza’s debut earlier this year, it saw a 7.91% conversion rate on its site from its Instagram bio, an 181% increase in follower growth across its social accounts, and a 429% increase in total post interactions, in part thanks to a prelaunch social strategy.

Marketing Brew sat down with Millstein to pull back the curtain on the partnership.

How it started: Anyone familiar with the DTC world knows it’s smaller than a hometown in a country song. So it’s no surprise that Graza co-founder Andrew Benin and Millstein connected long before this partnership to bounce branding ideas off each other. Fishwife’s products are always packed in olive oil, so it was only a matter of time before Graza entered the fold.

How it evolved: Originally, Graza wasn’t going to be part of a co-brand at all—the olive oil would’ve just been a footnote to this limited-edition product. But after Fishwife started sampling the product, the team noticed that Graza’s olive oil was one of Campfire Cod’s most prominent flavors. So the product itself inspired the co-brand.

Packaging a punch: The Campfire Cod packaging includes an olive-oil bottle and Graza green olives in the bottom left-hand corner, and the side of the packaging reads “olive oil by Graza.” The brands will “very likely” do a tasting event together soon so customers can sample both Graza and Fishwife at once.

Social success: Fishwife and Graza both promoted the product on social media, with Fishwife utilizing its primary channel, Instagram, and Graza posting about the collab on Twitter and IG (as well as its newsletter). All the promo posts were organic, but that didn’t stop one Graza Instagram story about the co-brand from reaching more than 11,000 accounts and engaging almost 900 of them, according to Kendall Dickieson, Graza’s social media consultant.

+1: Dickieson also noted that engagement on Graza’s posts about the collab was higher than usual in terms of the number of comments and DMs received.

Why DTC? Millstein told us that she likes partnering with DTC brands (like Fishwife’s previous partnership with Fly By Jing) because they are “extremely focused on their social platforms” and generate strong and engaged digital communities.

She thinks Graza, in particular, is an “up-and-coming brand that will soon be really huge,” making the co-brand “a great marketing opportunity and touch point.” For context, Millstein told us that Fishwife is about 80% DTC right now.

“We’re very, very much focused on growing the DTC channel for this year, so it does make sense to partner with brands that have the same aims as well as in terms of growing their own DTC channels,” Millstein said.