Feltest: Turning a niche market into a global opportunity

How Feltest empowers papermaking professionals

In a remote corner of the industrial world, in the niche of pulp and paper technology, you’ll find Marcel Lensvelt. A passionate inventor and the founder of Feltest, Marcel creates specialized tools and measuring instruments designed to help improve paper production.

His market is limited: in fact, only 3,700 people on Earth could be his customers. Marcel isn’t chasing millions. He’s chasing exactly the right 3,700 people.

That’s where our story begins. Despite having an incredibly unique product, the only one of its kind in the market, Feltest faced a major obstacle: obscurity.

Finding the 
right online marketing partner

In their extremely niche market, Feltest wanted to get found by the right people. The ideal scenario? Customers searching for the kind of tools Marcel offers would find Feltest easily, stay on their website and keep purchasing from them. However, with their current marketing setup, this was not possible.

And so Marcel began his search for an online marketing agency. Finding a partner he could trust and that would fulfill Feltest’s unique international marketing needs proved more difficult than he imagined.

Until SUM Digital came in. 
After more than six years of collaboration, Feltest is now a global player successfully serving several international markets and has been recognized as a winner of the prestigious FD Gazellen Award for the fastest-growing Dutch company. Not once, but twice!

Building a scalable webshop

At the start of our partnership, we immediately identified the main blocker holding back Feltest’s growth. Their website, built in WordPress and available in five languages, was slow, difficult to maintain and impossible to update quickly. Every minor change required a chain reaction of translators, edits and delays.

Customers couldn’t find Feltest. And even when they did, there was no scalable system to guide them towards other products or conversions.

We started by rebuilding a webshop that made it easier to scale. Setting it up was fast and affordable, laying the foundation for realizing Feltest’s international growth ambitions.

Next steps: further localization and reaching new customers worldwide

With a strong digital foundation and a proven international marketing playbook, Feltest is now ready to enter its next growth phase: deep localization in priority markets. While the first wave of expansion successfully brought Feltest products into 90 countries, the next step is to go beyond translation and adapt marketing and sales strategies to the cultural, regulatory and business realities of individual regions.

In the coming years, our partnership will focus on China, Japan, and Indonesia - three markets with significant growth potential but also unique challenges. From tailoring messaging and campaigns to resonate with local buyer behavior to refining SEO for regional search engines and setting up localized distribution channels, each market requires a customized go-to-market strategy.

This localized approach will strengthen Feltest’s positioning as the global leader in pulp and paper measurement technology while maintaining the laser focus on reaching exactly the right 3,700 professionals worldwide.