The agency reported magical gains. The bank statement told a different story.
Paid traffic converting at a third of the industry floor, and an agency whose numbers didn’t reconcile. We fixed what was leaking before adding a dollar more.
0.97% → 2.73%
Site conversion, same traffic
3× → 9–14×
Return on ad spend, same budget
+79%
Sessions, year over year
A luxury skincare company founded in 1948, now sold across North America, the UK, Germany and Asia. A proprietary ingredient with a genuine origin story, and a name built over decades on live TV shopping, where the founder herself became a beloved on-air personality. By early 2025 the brand faced the challenge common to legacy DTC: a strong product and a loyal older base, but a digital operation that hadn’t kept pace.
- Industry
- DTC premium skincare
- Revenue
- ~$20M
- Founded
- 1948 · three generations of family leadership
- Engagement
- 90-day intervention
“We need more ad spend.”
“Traffic was fake. The reported return wasn’t real, and the store and the email flows were leaking the buyers already arriving.”
A diagnostic review surfaced a cascade of interconnected problems. None were catastrophic in isolation. Together they were quietly draining budget and blocking the brand from its next stage. The store was converting paid traffic at 0.97% — roughly a third of the Shopify average.
- Inflated, opaque reporting. The agency claimed 11.7× ROAS on Meta. Cross-referenced against Shopify, the numbers didn’t reconcile — one “winning” campaign had generated $918 in net sales against $600 in spend.
- Zero segmentation. 27,000–39,000 email subscribers and no demographic data. A 60-year-old loyalist and a 37-year-old first-timer got the identical newsletter, offer and message.
- A friction-filled store. ~100 SKUs with no hierarchy; 80%-off ads landing on generic pages; a popup firing on top of the promo; a $99 free-shipping threshold that surprised buyers at checkout.
- Automation switched off. Klaviyo used as a basic email sender. Welcome, cross-sell, browse-abandonment, post-purchase, VIP and win-back flows missing or disabled.
Rather than overhaul everything at once, we ran a focused 90-day intervention on the highest-leverage constraints first — fix what’s leaking before adding more water to the bucket.
- 01
Agency audit and transition
A forensic review flagged fraudulent like-purchasing suppressing organic reach and campaigns optimised for clicks instead of purchases. Ad management came in-house with structured coaching.
- 02
Klaviyo flow architecture
Rebuilt the automation strategy — welcome, indoctrination, abandoned cart and checkout, win-back moved to 90 days in the founder’s voice, cross-sell, browse abandonment, post-purchase and VIP — with a framework for ongoing subject-line testing.
- 03
Segmentation and data
Captured birth-year data through an incentive campaign so a 37-year-old prospect sees different creative than a 55-year-old loyalist. Synced Klaviyo segments to Meta for exclusions and lookalikes.
- 04
Creative diversification
Multiple hooks across multiple angles, clear naming conventions and UTM tracking — replacing a handful of untested creatives with inconsistent attribution.
- 05
Founder-led storytelling
Coached the third-generation leader on short-form storytelling. A three-generation family narrative no competitor can replicate, and cheap to produce.
- 06
Ambassador programme
An opt-in structure to activate the brand’s most passionate customers as nano-influencers through affiliate links — no upfront payment, segmented by age.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site conversion rate | 0.97% | 2.73% | +181% |
| Meta ads ROAS | ~3× | 9–14× | +140–180% |
| Sessions, year over year | Baseline | +79% | +79% |
| Ad management | External agency | In-house with coaching | Full control |
| Audience segmentation | None | Age-cohort targeting | Activated |
| Klaviyo utilisation | Basic ESP | Flows + segmentation | Expanded |
The conversion jump moved the brand from well below the Shopify average into the range benchmarks consider strong for established DTC beauty — roughly 2.8× more orders from the same ad spend. On paid media, returns went from ~3× to a whopping 9–14× on the same budget.
“Before your guidance we were seeing maybe around 3× on every dollar of ad spend. After what you showed us, we started to see 9, 10, 11, 12, even 14×. It was an amazing experience.”
The first deliverable was the truth about the numbers. Before optimising a single flow, we reconciled the agency’s reported massive gains against actual Shopify sales, and it didn’t hold. You can’t fix what you’re mis-measuring. This case is anonymised at the client’s request; the figures are real and independently reconciled.
This brand had something most DTC companies spend millions trying to manufacture: a 77-year heritage, a genuine origin story, and a leader with the charisma to carry it. The work wasn’t reinvention — it was removing the friction between what the brand already was and the customers waiting to discover it. That’s almost always where the hidden revenue lives: not in more spend, but in the leaks between the traffic you’re already paying for and the sale.
How much of your ad spend is leaking before the sale?
A Two-Day Teardown finds where the money is actually stuck — starting with whether your numbers are even real — and names the one to three moves that unstick it. You keep the map either way.