Six weeks from peak season. CAC was the worst it had ever been.

A DTC outdoor apparel brand with a very seasonal business - Q4 was everything. Over 60% of annual revenue in three months. Great team, strong product. Also: 18 months of quietly rising customer acquisition costs that no single month had felt urgent enough to fix.

By the time they came to us, the cumulative drift had become a real problem. The timing was brutal - six weeks to peak season, no runway for a major restructure. They needed a diagnosis and a fix fast, or they were going into their most important quarter with their worst unit economics ever.

Get CAC back under control before peak season started. Understand the root cause so the fix held beyond Q4.

Rapid account diagnostic rather than a slow rebuild. Found two overlapping problems: campaigns were bidding against each other due to audience overlap (essentially an internal auction), and meaningful budget was still behind creative from the previous peak season - sending an out-of-season signal. Pruned 40% of campaigns. Fixed audience architecture. Built a focused creative sprint for peak.

• CAC down 27% before peak season started
• Best Q4 in the company's history - revenue up 41% year-on-year
• Cut 22% of media spend that was working against itself - reinvested into what was actually working
• CAC held at the new lower baseline after peak - the fix wasn't temporary

"I remember thinking: if we go into Q4 like this, we might grow revenue and still have a bad year. We didn't have a bad year." - COO