Profit in a year that punished everyone

Here's a scenario every brand founder dreads: you're heading into the biggest sales period of the year, you're radically overstocked, and your margins are already under pressure from a market that's been battered by inflation for two years straight.

Ryan Blunden
Ryan Blunden
– 2 min read
Profit in a year that punished everyone

This Mission

Penny Scallan was heading into Black Friday 2023 radically overstocked. Moving product wasn't optional, but urgent. Carrie, Penny Scallan Design's CEO, had been around long enough to know how brutal that period had become for consumer brands. Inflation had squeezed her customers for two years. She set the bar where she honestly thought it could land: revenue within 10% of the previous year. That would be a win. My job was to make sure it was.

This Outcome

The vast majority of Direct-to-Consumer brands selling through Shopify treat their paid ads like a megaphone. They turn up the volume (dollars), run the same ads as everyone else, and hope that louder means more. That tactic has a point of diminishing returns and rarely can it be sustained.

What I did instead was think carefully about who we were actually talking to. There were people who'd bought from Penny Scallan before — they already trusted the brand, they just needed a reason to come back. And there were people who'd never heard of it — they needed a different conversation entirely. Running the same message to both groups is lazy, and laziness costs money.

Working with Penny's internal creative team, I ran simultaneous campaigns, speaking to each Bullseye Customer with a specific purpose. Grow the brand by bringing new customers to the store, and increase baseline sales by reaching those who already knew us in the moment they were ready to buy. I watched the data every day and moved budget toward what was working. Live tracking and optimisation, close attention, and (to Carrie's credit) the ability and trust to make calls quickly.

This Impact

We matched 2022's record revenue. In a market that had punished most brands that year, we held the line.

But the number I keep coming back to is this: nearly 80% of new customers from that campaign went on to buy again. That matters more than the revenue figure. Getting someone to buy once during a sale is easy. But getting them to come back without a discount tough. A huge amount of credit goes to the Product Design – but hitting that audience with a message that resonates in that buying moment is where loyalty paid off.

The wins;

  • 13.05x Media Efficiency Ratio (up from 12.6x the prior year)
  • 49% reduction in customer acquisition cost
  • 79.74% of new customers converted into repeat buyers
  • Revenue matched 2022's record — in a significantly harder market

Services

  • Campaign strategy
  • Audience segmentation
  • Performance marketing (Meta Ads)
  • Real-time attribution and optimisation
  • Creative direction

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