Marshall Turns Nor’easter Season Into a Sales Engine for Suncast’s New Entry of Snow Shovels
When a product is new to your catalog and new to your audience, timing can be everything. For Suncast, a leading US manufacturer of resin outdoor products, growing awareness for their snow shovel line meant finding new consumers and expanding reach in new ways.
Marshall used Skai’s DSP and search capabilities to turn the winter of 2025-2026’s historic nor’easters into a precision marketing opportunity.
Challenge
Suncast was looking to grow awareness in a newer category. The right agency [and a nor’easter] did the trick.
Suncast built its reputation on premium resin products like deck boxes and sheds, at price points above $200. Snow shovels were a different game entirely: a line of Steel Core shovels, combo pushers, and car scrapers priced for everyday consumers, not commercial buyers. The category had been a smaller, growing part of the business, but the audience buying snow tools didn’t overlap much with Suncast’s traditional customer base.
The challenge for Marshall was twofold. First, expand Suncast’s reach into new consumer segments who weren’t already shopping the brand. Second, do it within the unpredictable, compressed windows that winter storms create. A nor’easter can spike purchase intent for days and then it’s gone. Missing that window means losing to entrenched competitors who already own the category year-round.
Solution
Two creative phases, one storm window
Marshall built a coordinated DSP and search strategy through Skai, timed around the major nor’easter events that hit the northeastern US during the winter of 2025-2026. The DSP side ran on a two-phase creative approach, each phase mapped to a different stage of consumer mindset.
Pre-storm. As forecasts confirmed incoming snowfall, Marshall activated geotargeted Amazon DSP campaigns through Skai aimed at specific metro areas in the storm’s path. Creative focused on preparation messaging, encouraging consumers to gear up before conditions hit.
During and post-storm. Once the storm arrived, Marshall swapped to a second set of creative with messaging geared toward dealing with current snowy conditions. This kept the product visible across the full arc of consumer intent, from anticipation through active need, and ensured Suncast was already top of mind before the first flake fell.
Limited keyword history? Build the playbook storm by storm
On the search side, Suncast had limited historical campaign data in snow shovels. Less keyword history, not as much of a baseline for what worked. Marshall used Skai’s Search Term Analysis to map the landscape from scratch, identifying which snow shovel-related search terms were driving the highest purchase intent during storm windows and surfacing new keyword opportunities as consumer behavior shifted with each weather event.
STA also helped the team cut wasted spend on broad or low-converting terms. That’s a real risk when you’re scaling a category without much historical data and don’t yet know which queries actually lead to sales versus which ones just burn budget.
The data compounded with each successive storm. Every nor’easter gave Marshall a sharper, more refined keyword playbook, turning what started as educated guesses into a search strategy backed by weeks of real performance data.
Where the incumbents weren’t looking
Snow shovels are a competitive, commodity-heavy category on Amazon with entrenched players who own the space year-round. Marshall used Skai’s Competitive Insights to monitor how those established brands were positioning and bidding during storm-driven demand spikes. More importantly, SCI showed where they weren’t.
The tool gave the team visibility into organic and paid overlap percentages, which was especially valuable for a brand still building its presence in the category. Understanding where competitors were already dominant told Marshall where to avoid a head-to-head budget war. Where gaps in competitor coverage appeared, Marshall could win visibility at a more efficient cost.
As storms moved across different regions, SCI helped the team track whether their geotargeted pushes were translating into real category movement for Suncast against the incumbents.
DSP and search were running in parallel, so the data had to be too
With DSP and search activating simultaneously against the same storm-window triggers, Marshall needed a way to understand how the channels were working together. Skai’s AMC reporting and Custom Dimensions allowed the team to connect upper-funnel DSP exposure to downstream search conversions, measuring whether consumers who saw Suncast’s preparation-phase DSP ads were later searching and converting at higher rates.
This full-funnel visibility was critical for a brand expanding into a category with limited historical data. It confirmed that the DSP investment was actively feeding the search funnel and driving purchase behavior when consumers were ready to buy.
“Expanding within a category that’s been a smaller, growing part of the business brings a different kind of challenge. You’re not starting from scratch, but you are scaling something that hasn’t yet been a primary focus.. all while the clock is ticking. This winter gave us a window we couldn’t ignore, and with every storm, we sharpened what we knew about the audience.”
Jake Busald
Sr Advertising Specialist, Marshall Associates
Results
By combining weather-aware geotargeting with coordinated DSP and search execution, Marshall turned an unpredictable winter into a breakout season for Suncast’s snow tools line, proving that a brand can rapidly scale a growing category when the strategy and timing are right.
- 94% of all sales New To Brand (vs 81% brand average baseline)
- $17 Return-On-Ad-Spend off of over 600 units sold via ads
- 500% Shipped Retail Growth Year over Year
“Entering a new category is always hard, especially when you’re up against brands that have owned it for years. But this winter gave us an incredible window. The storms created real, urgent demand, and with the right tools we could show up in exactly the right places at exactly the right time. That’s not an opportunity you get twice.”
Kelly Gerrard
Director eCommerce Marketing, Marshall Associates
About Marshall
Marshall combines 50 years of retail expertise with proprietary digital tools and clients’ capabilities to create winning solutions. With a proven track record building hundreds of brands and maximizing sales, this award-winning agency leverages their knowledge, relationships, and the trust they’ve built with customers and clients to dynamically plan and build comprehensive strategies and solutions to address market needs.
About Suncast
Suncast is the leading US-based designer of resin products for the home. For over 40 years, the company has designed and manufactured products right in the Western Chicago area using 100% domestically sourced resin. Its product line spans outdoor storage, home and garden, home storage, and snow tools, including its Steel Core shovel line, combo pushers, ice scrapers, and car scrapers. Suncast is committed to sustainability, investing in solar-powered technology and supporting environmental initiatives in the communities it serves.
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