Scaling OG Kicks

Acquisition - scaling against a tightening category.

Sneakers and streetwear is a relentless auction. Every brand is bidding on the same in-market buyer, the same hype releases and the same head terms on Google. Top-line growth had stalled, with paid struggling to break new ground without paying a premium that the category couldn’t absorb.

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Margin - nCAC vs. unit economics.

Gross margin in resale and streetwear is tight by category default, which meant every pound of new customer acquisition cost had to work harder than in most verticals. Spend was being pulled across the full catalogue rather than concentrated on the SKUs that actually delivered profit, and nCAC was creeping up against the margin headroom available.

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Brand efficiency - MER moving the wrong way.

MER, the leading indicator of overall paid media health, was sliding. Creative volume on Meta wasn’t keeping pace with the platform’s appetite for fresh assets, and the quality of what was running didn’t match the rest of the brand or product world. The result was lower returns per pound spent, even as media costs rose.

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Retention - a repeat revenue engine that wasn’t compounding.

In a category where lifetime value should be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, repeat customer revenue wasn’t growing. The CRM programme wasn’t building enough touchpoints across the buyer journey to turn first-time purchasers into a returning base, leaving the brand over-reliant on net-new acquisition to hit its number every month.

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Paid Social - creative volume, brand-led.

We rebuilt the Meta engine around creative, in line with how the platform has shifted toward creative as the primary growth lever. Volume and diversity of assets going live ramped up significantly, and have continued to climb as Meta’s appetite for fresh creative has grown. But volume only works if the work is good, so we levelled up the quality bar across every channel — making sure every piece of paid output looked and felt like the rest of the OG Kicks brand and product world. More, and better: these two factors were the single biggest driver behind the step-change in Meta and PMAX performance.

PMAX - creative-led top-of-funnel.

The same uplift in creative quality flowed through to Google PMAX, which had previously been a creative blind spot. Bespoke assets, repurposed and adapted from our paid social work, gave PMAX the top-of-funnel firepower to compete in a category where visual storytelling drives a huge share of the buying decision and where generic feed-driven creative gets ignored.

Paid Search - margin-led catalogue management.

With such a large active catalogue, Google was wasting spend on low-margin SKUs that didn’t move the business forward. We split the catalogue into three tiers — Best Performers, High Margin and Low Margin and structured campaigns around them so spend, bid strategy and prioritisation could flex by tier. That gave us direct control over the margin profile of every pound spent on Google, instead of letting the auction decide.

CRM - touchpoints across the buyer journey.

We relaunched the entire CRM strategy across campaigns and automations, with the bulk of the lift coming through automation. In a category where buyers shop across multiple drops, brands and price points, more touchpoints throughout the buyer journey is what turns first-time purchasers into a returning base and that’s what unlocked the repeat revenue growth the brand needed to take pressure off net-new acquisition.