Key metrics
- 15+ qualified inbound leads/month
- First inbound deal within 6 weeks
- Built a predictable inbound channel
- 100+ buyer-intent pages compounding
Featuring
Will Wu
Director, Solo Gallery
Industry
Furniture DistributionProducts
“For years, we ran on word-of-mouth and referrals. With Mersel, we now get inbound inquiries every week from buyers who found us through ChatGPT and Google. It completely changed how we run sales.”
Will Wu
Director, Solo Gallery
Solo Gallery distributes high-end furniture to designers, architects, and hospitality projects. For most of the company's history, the team had built their reputation through word-of-mouth and a tight referral network. It worked. It just wasn't predictable.
When buyers started using AI to research suppliers, the old playbook stopped scaling.
Years of Word-of-Mouth. Zero Predictable Inbound.
For most of the company's history, Solo Gallery's pipeline came almost entirely through referrals. A designer would pass their name to a colleague on a new project. A developer who'd worked with them once would loop them into the next build. Will Wu, the company's director, knew the rhythm by heart: treat every existing relationship like gold, and hope it kept opening the next door.
It worked, until it didn't.
Will knew the industry. High-end furniture distribution runs on relationships, gut-feel referrals, and procurement leads who already know your name. If you weren't already on a designer's shortlist, you weren't on the project. The products were strong and the work was real, but discovery was someone else's hand on the steering wheel.
A Website That Brings Buyers In
The team didn't have to write anything, publish anything, or manage anything. Mersel handled the research, content, publishing, attribution, and ongoing optimization end-to-end. Solo Gallery's only job was to respond to leads.
Each page was built to answer one specific question a designer, architect, or hospitality buyer might ask AI, from product-specific queries to broader sourcing questions. Together, the pages compounded into a content footprint AI search engines could trust and recommend.
First Inbound Deal in 6 Weeks. Compounding From There.
The mix of buyer types shifted too. Where referrals brought mostly the same circle of repeat designers, AI-search inbound now brought in hospitality projects, international developers, and specifying architects who'd never been in Solo Gallery's network before.
“What surprised us isn't the volume. It's that the buyers reaching out have already read our pages and know exactly what they want. Our closing rate has gone up because of it.”
Will Wu
Director, Solo Gallery
What's Next: Becoming the Default in AI Search
Solo Gallery is now expanding the Cite engine to cover new product categories and adjacent buyer types: interior architects, retail experience designers, and developer-led projects. The channel that started as an experiment is becoming the company's primary growth engine.
The goal from here is straightforward: when a designer asks ChatGPT for a high-end furniture supplier, Solo Gallery should be the first answer. Every page Mersel publishes makes that more likely.
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