Three agencies. Three years. Same result every time.

A founder-led premium skincare brand. Genuinely good product, real brand equity, a loyal organic community. The founder had funded it herself - which meant every pound of paid spend that disappeared hurt personally. Not just strategically. Personally.

Paid had never worked. Not a little - categorically. Traffic from every campaign converted at below 0.8%. Each agency had their theory. Each one had run their experiments and quietly gone away. Nobody had looked at what happened after the click.

Build a paid acquisition channel that's actually profitable. Figure out why the previous attempts all hit the same wall.

Started where the others hadn't = at the landing page, not the ad. Cold-audience paid traffic was landing on a full-price product page built for warm organic visitors who already understood the brand. There was no reason to believe, no entry point. Built a new funnel around a lower-commitment starter kit with an editorial landing page that did the job cold audiences needed it to do.

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• Conversion rate from paid traffic went from 0.8% to 3.1% within 60 days - no change to ad spend or targeting
• CAC dropped 58%. First profitable paid channel in the brand's history.
• Starter kit became a top-3 revenue SKU within 3 months
• Customers acquired through the new funnel showed 11-point higher repeat purchase rates

"I'd spent three years assuming paid just didn't work for brands like mine. It worked. I just hadn't given it the right front door." - Founder