About Illumade
Illumade, based in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, designs and produces clever solutions for use in and around the house. Its best known brand is Lightswing ®, conceived at the founder’s kitchen table in 2014: a suspension system that lets pendant lights slide and rotate without leaving marks on the ceiling. The system is installed in more than 25,000 households and sold across over 15 European countries.
The challenge: manual work that does not scale
At Illumade, marketing campaigns were rolled out largely by hand. A single campaign quickly produced hundreds of creatives that had to be translated into about 10 languages and adapted to multiple formats. Uploads, bidding, and daily monitoring then followed for every platform and every country. The automation that did exist was scattered across separate tools, so analyzing performance across the different countries meant repeating the same manual work, and the process stayed fragile.
With two people responsible for the process of creatives to go-live and reporting, that was not sustainable, certainly not with new product launches and further international growth on the roadmap. Illumade wanted to standardize and automate the campaign process, but explicitly did not want a black box. The condition was that the team could understand, adjust, and extend the workflows after delivery, and host everything in house if desired.
The solution: one input for every platform
DataNorth AI selected n8n as the central automation layer: open source, self hostable, and therefore under Illumade’s own control. The project ran as a co-creation, with a weekly update and demo where progress was reviewed with the marketing team.
The approach consisted of:
- Architecture and integrations: n8n was set up with service accounts, logging, and a reusable base structure, plus API integrations to Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, and Google Ads.
- Two workflows: An upload flow pushing campaigns and creatives from a single input to Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok, and a KPI flow writing conversion data to Google Sheets per country and platform.
- Knowledge transfer as a condition: A practical four hour n8n workshop, with documentation and a technical walkthrough, so the Illumade team can build and troubleshoot independently.
The results: impact in figures
After development both workflows went live in Illumade’s environment:
Impact on the campaign process
- Almost 10 countries with localized content
- Campaigns go from a single input to 3 advertising platforms at once.
- KPI data from 3 platforms is consolidated automatically per country and per platform.
Ownership
- After development and a workshop ownership moved to Illumade: the weekly and monthly overviews and the trend analyses were built by the in-house team afterwards.
- Conversion KPIs are connected on every platform, and additional advertising accounts can be added through the configuration without rebuilding the workflows.
Conclusion
By replacing a fragmented campaign process with a single central automation, two marketeers keep control over campaigns in about 10 countries. The collaboration with DataNorth AI proves that automation pays off even more so once the team can manage and extend the workflows itself.
