Before Gushwork

Distil’s existing business was relationship-led. That worked for known customers and familiar markets. But they realized it’s not a scalable way for new buyers to discover them, especially in the US market.

As said above, the website wasn’t helping either. It wasn’t creating a clear path for buyers to move from search to a sales conversation.

For a company trying to enter a specialized market, that was the gap.

They needed a way to show up when buyers were already searching for specific products, ingredients, formulations, or contract manufacturing capabilities.

Building for a market of specialists

Specialty chemicals buyers do not search in broad terms. They search for the specific molecule, formulation problem, certification, process, or manufacturing requirement they care about. 

A buyer looking for a personal care ingredient or formulation partner may search for non-micronized zinc oxide for sunscreen, bio-based emulsifiers for clean beauty, or a zinc oxide and titanium dioxide natural sunscreen formulation.

Generic industry content rarely reaches that buyer. The pages had to be more specific.

Gushwork built Distil’s Resource Hub around this search behavior. The research focused on buyer queries across Distil’s product catalog, competitor sites, and relevant technical searches.

Three demand pockets stood out:

Personal care and beauty ingredients, which were already the primary target.

Toll and contract manufacturing for specialty chemicals, an angle Distil had considered but not actively prioritized.

Formulation services, which sat close to the original personal care motion.

The Resource Hub went live in April. By the end of May, 133 pages were live across formulation guides, ingredient-specific blogs, service pages, and buyer-intent content targeting specific molecules.

The pages were built to connect related searches. A buyer could enter through a specific technical topic, then move toward a related service page if the need matched what Distil offered.

What the channel surfaced

Within six weeks, inbound leads started arriving.

The first one came from India. Although Distil already had a relationship-driven domestic business, these were not buyers coming through existing networks. They were companies finding Distil through Google or AI search engines. Some came from adjacent specialty chemicals verticals. Others came from personal care ingredients, chemical distribution, or formulation-related searches.

That mattered because it showed that search was opening up discovery even in a market where Distil already had a presence. 

The second surprise was geography.

Inquiries also came from markets Distil was not actively targeting, including Australia and the Middle East. Some landed through toll manufacturing pages. Others came through the formulation service pages. These were buyers researching contract production options outside their home markets and discovering Distil through the Resource Hub.

Then the original US personal care signal began to show up, too.

US buyers started finding Distil through technical content, spending time across specific formulation and ingredient pages before reaching out with project interest.

By late June, Distil had received inbound submissions in double digits since the Resource Hub went live. Fifteen spam submissions were already filtered out by the lead dashboard before reaching the team. The geographic mix was broader than the original strategy had targeted: India, the US, Australia, and the Middle East.

What changed for Distil

Distil started with a US-focused goal. But the channel showed them something wider: buyers in multiple geographies were already searching for the kinds of specialty chemicals, formulation, and manufacturing capabilities Distil could offer.

That changed the value of the Resource Hub. It was not only a content engine for one market. It became a way to see where demand was already forming.

For the US personal care market, the early signal showed that the core strategy was starting to work. For India and other international markets, the inbound revealed adjacent demand pockets that Distil had not actively built campaigns around.

That gave the team a clearer view of which markets and services were worth paying attention to next.

Why it matters

Distil did not need a website that explained the company better. They needed a way to be found by technical buyers at the moment of search.

Gushwork helped create that channel. The Resource Hub turned specific buyer queries into discovery paths for Distil. It helped the company show up for ingredient searches, formulation needs, toll manufacturing intent, and contract production research.

The original goal was to get US leads, which they started seeing within six weeks of working with us. However, the bigger outcome was that the search opened more than one market for them.