Experience

The Challenge

This fashion house had been selling through wholesale for two decades. Department stores, multi-brand boutiques, a handful of flagship retail locations. The margins were thin, the brand was dependent on buyers' decisions, and every season was a negotiation.

When they launched their own ecommerce site, the expectation was that digital would fix the margin problem. It didn't. After 18 months of running their DTC channel, online revenue accounted for less than 8% of total sales. The site existed, but it wasn't a business.

The root problem wasn't traffic. They had four separate agencies: one for SEO, one for paid social, one for Google Ads, and a freelancer handling email. None of them talked to each other. The SEO agency was driving blog traffic that never converted. The paid social agency was optimising for link clicks instead of purchases. Google Ads was running branded search only, capturing demand they would have gotten anyway. And email was a monthly newsletter with no segmentation, no automation, and a 12% open rate.

Total monthly digital marketing spend across all four providers: just under £25K. Revenue generated: roughly £40K. That's a 1.6x return before factoring in product costs. The DTC channel was effectively losing money.

The Approach

We replaced all four providers with a single, unified strategy. One team. One plan. Every channel working toward the same commercial goals.

Month 1: Audit and restructure. We mapped every touchpoint, killed what wasn't working, and rebuilt the foundation. Google Ads was expanded beyond brand terms into category and competitor keywords. The paid social strategy shifted from traffic campaigns to a proper funnel with prospecting, consideration, and conversion layers. SEO efforts were redirected from vanity blog content toward commercial pages and category terms that actually drive purchase intent.

Month 2: Email and CRM overhaul. We built a proper email infrastructure. Welcome series for new subscribers (5 emails over 14 days). Browse abandonment flows. Cart abandonment with two follow-ups. Post-purchase sequences driving repeat purchases and cross-category exploration. Win-back campaigns for lapsed customers. Segmentation based on purchase history, engagement level, and acquisition source. The monthly newsletter was redesigned and split into two versions: one for active customers, one for prospects.

Months 3-6: Scale and optimise. With the foundation in place, we scaled spend gradually. Paid social budget increased from £8K to £18K per month as ROAS justified the investment. Google Ads expanded into Shopping campaigns and Performance Max with product feed optimisation. SEO content shifted to collection-level pages targeting specific style categories the brand owned (think "Italian linen trousers" rather than "fashion trends 2026"). Email became the single highest-ROI channel, generating revenue on autopilot through the automation flows.

The critical difference was integration. When a paid social campaign drove a first purchase, the email automation picked up the relationship. When SEO content ranked for a product category, the Google Ads team paused that keyword to avoid cannibalisation. Every channel had a defined role, and none of them operated in isolation.

The Results

• DTC revenue: £40K/month → £128K/month in 6 months (3.2x growth)
• Blended ROAS across all channels: 4.1x (up from 1.6x)
• Email revenue share: 31% of total DTC revenue (up from 4%)
• Email open rate: 38% (up from 12%)
• Google Ads ROAS: 6.8x after expanding beyond branded search
• Paid social ROAS: 3.4x at nearly double the original spend
• SEO organic traffic to commercial pages: +145% over 6 months
• Customer repeat purchase rate: 22% (up from 9%)

DTC went from 8% of total company revenue to over 25% within two quarters. The wholesale dependency started to shift. The brand had leverage it never had before: its own customer relationships, its own data, and a channel with margins three times higher than wholesale.

What Made the Difference

Four agencies working independently will always optimise for their own channel metrics. The SEO agency wants more traffic. The paid social agency wants more clicks. Nobody owns the customer journey from first touch to repeat purchase.

Consolidating under one strategy meant every pound of spend had a purpose beyond its own channel. Paid social drove first purchases. Email converted those into repeat buyers. SEO captured organic demand that scaled without incremental spend. Google Ads filled the gaps. The result was compound growth, where each channel amplified the others instead of competing with them.

Services Used: Paid Social (Meta), Google Ads, SEO, Email Marketing & CRM