Case study
DFT, Sri Lanka: a bedding factory with no name board, selling nationwide through search
DFT manufactures pillows, duvets, bed sheets, protectors and toppers in Peliyagoda, and supplies both retailers and households. It has never run traditional advertising, and the factory does not carry a name board. Everything a customer needs to find it, they find online, which puts the whole of demand on an ecommerce store, organic search and paid social.
The engagement at a glance
- Client
- DFT, Desmond Fiber Traders, a bedding manufacturer
- Contact
- Gabriel Fernando, Founder
- Market
- Sri Lanka nationwide, plus wholesale and export enquiries
- Engagement
- Ongoing
- Scope
- Ecommerce website, SEO, Meta ads, wholesale lead generation
- Store
- Twelve product categories, retail and wholesale in one site
- Website
- dftpillows.com
- Google Business Profile
- 334 reviews as of August 2026. Open the profile
- The store itself
- dftpillows.com, live and taking orders nationwide. Visit dftpillows.com
The brief
What the business needed
A manufacturer with no shopfront, no name board and no advertising history is an unusual brief, because there is no existing demand to capture. It has to be created, and then it has to convert on a phone.
Nothing physical to find
There is no retail storefront and the factory carries no signage. A customer cannot happen upon this business, and a wholesale buyer cannot drive past it. Discovery is entirely a search and social problem, which raises the stakes on both.
Category terms, not brand terms
Nobody was searching for the brand at the start, so ranking for it would have proved nothing. The work had to compete for what people actually type: duvets, mattress toppers, pregnancy pillows and bed sheets, each with a price qualifier and each with Sri Lanka on the end.
Two buyers, one website
A household buying one duvet and a retailer buying pallets need different journeys, different pages and different campaigns, but they share a catalogue and a factory. The store had to serve both without either feeling like an afterthought.
The work
Three workstreams, still running
The store came first, because there was no point sending demand to a site that could not take an order. Search and paid social have run alongside each other since.
Foundation
The ecommerce store
A full catalogue site rather than a brochure with a phone number on it. Twelve product categories, individual product pages, and a wholesale route that does not interfere with the retail one.
- Twelve category structures built: pillows, bed sheets, fitted sheets, duvets, duvet covers, pillow cases, mattress toppers, mattress protectors, covers, bed runners, cushions and towels
- Individual product pages, each able to rank in its own right rather than depending on the category above it
- A separate wholesale section, including padding and fibre sheet lines that retail customers never see
- Checkout and nationwide delivery for Sri Lanka, with the catalogue organised the way the factory actually produces
- Built on WooCommerce, in the client's own hosting and accounts
Ongoing
The SEO programme
Aimed at category demand rather than brand demand. The test of this work is whether somebody who has never heard of DFT finds it while shopping for a duvet, which is why the reporting below separates brand from non-brand.
- Keyword work built around how Sri Lankan shoppers search: the product, plus a price qualifier, plus the country
- Category pages treated as the primary landing pages, since they answer a shopping query better than a single product does
- Product pages targeted at specific intent, such as the U shape pregnancy pillow and Egyptian cotton bed sheets
- Wholesale pages given their own search targets, so a trade buyer does not land on a retail cart
- Technical and on-page work across a catalogue that keeps growing as the factory adds lines
Ongoing
Meta advertising
Campaigns are split by what the business wants back, not by product. Wholesale campaigns are optimised for conversations and calls, retail campaigns for clicks into the store, because a pallet order and a single duvet do not arrive the same way.
- Wholesale campaigns optimised for messaging conversations and calls placed, running month on month
- Ecommerce campaigns optimised for traffic into the store and its category pages
- Product level campaigns for the lines that carry a clear hook, including gel pillows, hotel grade pillows and duvets
- A separate campaign for Maldives demand, kept apart from the Sri Lankan sets so neither distorts the other
- Reporting on messaging conversations, calls and link clicks rather than on impressions or reach
Search performance
What the search programme looks like in Search Console
Figures below are from the client's own Google Search Console, for the sixteen months to 12 August 2026, which is the full window Search Console retains. They describe search performance for dftpillows.com, and the split between brand and non-brand is the part worth reading.
27,928
clicks from Google Search
Across 127 pages, in the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
1.09m
impressions
The catalogue is visible far more often than it is clicked, which is normal for shopping queries and is where the next round of work sits.
836
non-brand queries inside the top ten
Out of the top 1,000 queries exported. Brand terms account for 13 of them, so this is people shopping for a product rather than looking for DFT.
15,482
clicks to category pages
Seventeen category pages carry the majority of search demand, which is what the store was structured for.
The pattern in the query data is consistent: product, then price, then country. Mattress topper Sri Lanka sits at an average position of 2.6, duvet price in Sri Lanka at 3.4, duvet covers Sri Lanka at 3.2, pregnancy pillow Sri Lanka at 4.4. The brand itself ranks first for dft pillows and for the company's full name, Desmond Fiber Traders, but those were never the point.
The client's view
What the client said about it, in his own words
Gabriel Fernando recorded this himself. He describes three years in business, growth that was slow at the start, and what changed after the online work began. The 60 per cent is his own figure for his own business, quoted as he said it rather than restated as ours.
Since we start online marketing service and our business sales forecast has grown up by 60%, and especially to Mr. [Alston] Antony, they done a very good job in ranking in our Google. … I'm very happy to do a business with them.
Clients
Brands we work on
Client brands and our own properties, across healthcare, advertising, retail, interiors, software and community sites, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and beyond. The portfolio separates the two.
Free, 15 minutes, no obligation
If search is the whole of your demand, it is worth doing properly
Fifteen minutes with the person who would run your account. Useful if you sell something people shop for by category rather than by your name, or if you are selling wholesale and retail out of the same catalogue.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected].
What we cover on the call
- The problem as you see it, in your words first
- Where marketing is leaking: traffic, enquiries, follow-up or closing
- What you have already tried, and what came of it
- Which channel your margins and sales capacity can actually justify
- What a first engagement would need to cover, and roughly how long
- Straight answers to whatever you want to ask, on the call