Ru

Black Village

A countryside hotel

2023–2026

From three cabins to two sites

The hotel came to us in February 2023 with three cabins and a brief to build a steady flow of guests around them. Over three years Black Village grew to two sites and fifty cabins, and its social channels went from a shop window to a sales channel.

SMMPerformanceInfluenceProduction
A fire pit and loungers outside a cabin

The brief

A countryside hotel is not sold by its description but by its picture: a guest chooses where to spend the weekend with their eyes. The brand had no social channels at all — no visual language, and no reason to follow.

The second brief was the return. A cabin booking is an expensive thing to win, and the advertising had to bring a guest in for less than they left behind. At the start the cost of sale sat at 25%.

What we did

01

Assembled the brand and the channels

We built the strategy and the brand book, dressed Instagram, Telegram and VK, and agreed a year-long sprint with the key lines of work for each quarter.

02

Put production on a schedule

Regular photo and video shoots on site. The material goes into content, onto the website and into the advertising, so the brand always has something to say in season.

03

Brought in creators and partners

Over 100 creators in a year, and collaborations with Rozovy Krolik, Kofebon, Marcellis, the Vzaperti escape rooms and 4 Lapy — from set-piece projects to joint offers.

04

Rolled out advertising on Yandex and VK

Over 50 audience segments, 15 creative packages and 300 advertisements. Every season brings new formats and new ad tools into the work.

05

Closed the loop from social to booking

Telegram bots and email: an offer announced on social and a mailing to the list a couple of days ahead sell the hotel out for Black Friday and New Year.

06

Brought the cost of a booking down

Budget was reallocated by what actually returned rather than by channel. Cost of sale fell from 25% to 5%, and the average cost of a booking by a factor of 2.2.

6K

Cabin bookings

×2.2 lower

Cost per booking

5%

Cost of sale, was 25%

Guests on a cabin terrace
Grapefruit going into the hot tub
A hot tub with citrus on the deck
A cabin among the firs

0%

Nextcase
Art Hello
PerformanceResearchAnalytics
Open

Start a project

What can we help with?

Fill in the form

Yaroslav Lasch

Co-founder

Yaroslav Lasch

Co-founder of the studio: strategy, media and business development — from the first conversation with a client to the media plan review.

Over eleven years in marketing, ten of them in the advertising industry. Founder of Saint-Digital, co-founder of AdTonic; Acting CCO at Hybe.io. Sits on the state examination board of the Graduate School of Management, St Petersburg University.

Clients: VTB (₽4bn+ in media budgets), CDS, Growfood, Samsung, Nike, Novartis, Sandoz, The Coca-Cola Company, Alfa-Bank, MOEX, Binance, Uber, Revolut, Burger King, Glorax, Gazprom Neft, more.tv, Samokat.

strategymedia planningbusiness development
Ilya Gushchin

co-founder

Ilya Gushchin

Co-founder of the studio. A serial entrepreneur: he builds and launches businesses, from a communications agency to a law firm.

Co-founder of the communications agency Pravda, of AdTonic and of the law firm Gushchin and Partners. Over ten years in marketing and advertising.

A marketing degree from Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University, and a seat on the state examination board of the Graduate School of Management, St Petersburg University. Recorded a strategic marketing course for the Polytechnic University.

strategic marketingadvertisingpartnerships
Andrey Simakov

product

Andrey Simakov

Builds products that solve a real user problem and return measurable value to the business.

A product manager with an engineering background: he worked his way up from design engineer to running products.

Owns the product at every stage — researches what users need, shapes and prioritises the backlog, ships the MVP and grows the solution one iteration at a time. Leans on product analytics: decisions come from the data, and what shows a result is what gets scaled.

user researchbacklogproduct analytics
Valentina Dubrovina

performance

Valentina Dubrovina

Sees to it that advertising does more than reach the right people — that it pays. Which is why CPL, ROI and cost-of-sale come first, not CTR and CPC.

Ten years in digital marketing. Four of them spent promoting concerts and festivals: she started as a copywriter, worked with content and partners, and grew into running projects. Then she realised what she liked most was paid search and paid social.

Works in media planning and analytics. She knows that behind a successful campaign are not magic and a lucky creative but dozens of spreadsheets and hundreds of rows of carefully segmented keywords and ads.

paid searchpaid socialmedia planning
Ekaterina Zantman

smm

Ekaterina Zantman

Sees to it that the social strategy does not stay in the deck but turns into content people want to watch, save and buy from.

A social media specialist with over six years behind her. She makes the content, puts the strategy together, writes the copy, and keeps every channel working on a business goal rather than merely being "run".

Produces shoots end to end — from the idea and the references to the crew, the location and the finished content — and works with influencers: finds the creators, negotiates, briefs them, tracks the results. She does not believe in collaborations for reach: if a creator doesn't fit the audience or the brand's goal, pretty numbers don't impress her.

social mediaproductioninfluencers
Igor Kolesnik

design

Igor Kolesnik

Makes the whole site — from structure and layout through markup to deployment, with no hand-off halfway.

A web and product designer who came into design from engineering. The habit stayed: understand how the thing works first, open the layout second. He works at both ends — award-worthy creative sites, where everything rests on the idea and the motion, and complex interfaces and design systems, where everything rests on the rules.

Builds in Astro: static sites that open fast and can be edited afterwards without a developer. He owns more than the layouts and the code — the build, the fonts, the weight of images and video, caching and compression on the server, the enquiry forms. This site was made the same way.

interfacesastrofront-end
Darya Bashmakova

graphic design

Darya Bashmakova

Owns the way the studio and its clients look: identity, layouts, banners — everything the eye reaches before the text.

A graphic designer. She builds the identity and the way it lives on in layouts: logo, type pairings, colour, grid — and the rules that keep it standing once she is not in the room.

Draws the ad layouts, the decks and the content packaging for each channel. She holds that design works not when it is beautiful but when the message lands at first glance.

identitylayoutsdecks
Kristina Shmeleva

projects

Kristina Shmeleva

Sees an idea through into something real: she gathers the people, the tasks and the resources into one system and carries the project through to the result.

She can talk to everyone — the owner and the client, the designer, the developer, the contractor. She takes the chaos apart, puts it in order and tells the team exactly what we are making, why, and by when.

She holds the whole project — from the first idea and the breakdown of the work through to launch and the final numbers.

planningcoordinationdeadlines