Scaling established wholesale brands through D2C

The engine

• 25+ video editors and 10+ designers in a flex team based around the world, so production runs 24/7.
• Ramp to 100+ videos a month within 4–6 weeks of kick-off — the volume a launch and a Q4 need to find winners fast.
• Specialised in D2C ads: hooks, formats and edits built for Meta first, cut down for Google and organic.
• Usually, we don’t need project managers. But for the 6 October launch we would recommend one, to ensure deliverables stay on track.

Process in action · Big Potato

• $3.5m revenue in six weeks from 100+ videos made in six weeks. #1 in Amazon rankings in both UK and US.
• We were briefed on 31 October to deliver scaled performance by Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Christmas in both US and UK.
• Spend was over $175k per month. This required scaled creative production ASAP.
• We applied our Creative Strategy framework with our flex team + PMs to deliver over 100 video ads — concepted, edited and delivered — in a 6-week period.

Day to day

• Sam as your key point of contact. Core + Flex team introduced at different parts of the planning process.
• Weekly meeting rhythm: creative review, production tracker, performance and next steps (details on the operations slide).
• Real-time comms in Slack (or Teams if that is your house). Decisions on creative live in shared Canva docs; Slack chases the specifics.
• A shared live dashboard, updated weekly ahead of calls, tailored to what you want to see.

Where you plug in

• Your team owns brand, product truth and the customer segments you already know. We build the testing framework on top of them.
• Creative approvals in Canva comments at four stages, so sign-off is collaborative rather than a hand-back.
• UGC creator commercials and product sends sit with your internal team; sourcing and briefing sits with us.
• For the 6 October launch we add flex-team project management so the always-on rhythm isn’t the thing carrying a launch.

What Triple Whale gives us

• Per-channel contribution alongside blended paid contribution — impression-based versus click-based sales, side by side.
• Touchpoint analysis: how clicks become customers — how many channels, which ones, how many exposures.
• LTV and cohort analysis — the payback period of customers acquired on a Q4 offer, cohort by cohort.
• A single view that reconciles Meta, Google and your store, so double-counting is visible rather than argued about.

How it runs

• Creative strategy first: audience niches, what they want, the problem they are solving, how the product answers it.
• The 10-ad framework: 5 audiences × 2 positions × 10 ad types = 100 ads without over-thinking every brief.
• Flex team of 25+ editors and 10+ designers around the world — production doesn’t stop when London does.
• Project managers brought in to keep large-scale / tight-timing projects on track.

The planning output · CabinZero example

5 personas × 2 positions, each with a product purpose — the brief for every ad in the sprint. × 10 ad types = 100 distinct ads from one plan.

The situation

• A travel-bag brand with a thriving wholesale network and strong name recognition.
• D2C existed, but without paid media it never reached escape velocity; organic alone couldn’t build a customer base in multiple markets, including the US.
• No Meta Ads programme, no creative engine, no view of what a D2C customer was worth.

What we did — and what happened

• Launched Meta Ads from scratch with an audience-led creative strategy and a steadily scaled budget.
• Incrementally increased budget with peaks in Q4 — for both spend and creative.
• $3m of annual D2C revenue within 18 months, with Q4 spend averaging around $30,000 a month.

The situation

• A traditional wholesale fashion business with a good organic D2C presence.
• The ceiling wasn’t demand — it was creative volume on Meta and product-level management on Google.
• Seasonal peaks were under-invested because they hadn’t cracked incremental growth from paid; the accounts grew fat off brand search.

What we did — and what happened

• Scaled Meta ad production — audience personas, weekly creative sprints, a three-phase Black Friday playbook.
• Hyper-efficient Google Ads product management: feed titles by attribute, Shopping structured by margin and season.
• Over $3m in a single quarter, with Q4 spend averaging around $40,000 a month.
• Cohort data showed customers acquired early in Q4 shopped again at BFCM, December and the January sale — the payback story we would build for you.

The situation

• A US D2C apparel brand with sales growing year on year and a loyal community.
• Meta Ads had never been run as a proper programme — creative, audiences and measurement were ad hoc.
• The question was whether paid social could add to the growth curve rather than cannibalise it.

What we did — and what’s currently happening

• Built the Meta programme properly: persona-led creative, structured testing, clean tracking.
• 4×+ ROAS on the programme, with YoY sales growth continuing on top.
• Q4 forecast spend of $20–30,000 a month — scaled as the return holds, in the same 20–25% steps we’d use for you.

Communication + measurement

• Slack — real-time comms with your team (Teams if you prefer); specifics chased, decisions logged.
• Triple Whale — the independent judge of performance: per-channel contribution, customer journeys, LTV and cohorts, reconciled to Shopify.

Creative production

• Canva — every concept, script and edit presented for comments and sign-off; statics designed and localised here.
• Claude — audience research, hook and script generation at volume, ad-copy variants and weekly reporting narrative.
• CapCut — fast 9x16 video editing across the flex team, so cuts and hook variations ship in hours.

What we define

• The most viable audience niches and what their relationship with the product is.
• What do they want to achieve? What problem do they want to solve?
• How does the product address each of those — the product truth per audience.

Then the 10-ad framework

• 5 audiences × 2 positions × 10 ad types = 100 ads made without over-thinking every brief.
• Each ad type has a job (show-don’t-tell, us-vs-them, output benefits…) so testing is structured, not random.
• The framework is the testing framework: every ad is a hypothesis about an audience and a position.

Agenda

• Meet and greet.
• Overview of the strategic plan for launch.
• Alignment on creative and audience strategy.
• Planning for the ad-creation sprint and the first 30-60-90 days.

Who is in the room

• Agency: Sam, Alex, Emily and the project managers.
• Client: Samantha (Growth Marketing Manager); Tarrah (SVP, Marketing).
• Output: a written launch plan with owners and dates, circulated within 48 hours.

What the hour covers

• Review ad creative.
• Monitor the production process of unique ad assets.
• Review ad performance and data — daily during launch, weekly thereafter.

Who attends

• Agency: Sam and the project managers.
• Client: Samantha.
• The live dashboard is shared ahead of the call, so the meeting is for decisions, not for reading numbers.
• Strategic vs tactical: the weekly is tactical. A monthly 45-minute strategy review (Sam + Samantha + Tarrah: what we learned, what changes next month) and a quarterly planning session (Warners, seasonal calendar, budgets) keep the strategy work separate from performance reviews.

How it works

• All creative is presented in Canva slides; feedback is given in comments.
• Clients and agency can make suggested edits directly, which makes sign-off more efficient and more collaborative.
• Ad copy is then combined with the assets; two rounds of amends on finalised assets and captions.

Where static and video ads are approved

• Concept stage — in the first 90 days, or in campaign periods.
• Scripting / hook-writing stage — always.
• Edit 1 — always.
• Edit 2 — always.

Channels

• Slack is the preferred channel, but we work into your processes — Teams included.
• All major content and creative decisions are taken on the shared Canva docs.
• Slack is then used to chase down specifics — for example approval on a particular creative element.

Accountability

• One shared tracker for requests, approvals, launches and billing, visible to both teams.
• Response times: emergency within 1 hour, ads issue within 4 hours (5am – 5pm EST); standard email within 24 hours.
• Escalation runs to Sam directly. Billing managed by Sam + PMs; media on automatic card payment in Meta and Google.

What it lets us do

• See the per-channel contribution as well as the blended paid contribution — tracking impression-based versus click-based sales.
• Touchpoint analysis of how clicks become customers: how many channels, which ones, how many times they need to see ads.
• LTV and cohort analysis — particularly useful for assessing the payback time of customers acquired on an offer during Q4.

What we saw at Chinti & Parker

• Customers acquired early in Q4 shopped again over BFCM, December and the January sales.
• We could see how frequently they purchased again, which offers made them buy, and how long they took to pay back.
• That is the analysis we would run on True & Co’s October purchasers before Black Friday.

The method

• Blended MER = all revenue ÷ all media spend; contribution margin = revenue less product, shipping and media cost.
• Because both move weekly, we can see revenue go up and down against spend on any one channel — the simplest incrementality read there is.
• Structured tests on top: Meta geo holdouts once volume supports a read; Google brand-suppression tests outside launch and peak.

The decision metrics

• Blended CPA for the cost of a customer across everything.
• CM3 for whether that customer was profitable after media.
• Channels earn budget on their incremental contribution, not their reported ROAS.

How it is built

• Start from the customer segments your team has already identified; add the niches our creative strategy process surfaces.
• For each segment, a hypothesis per ad type from the 10-ad framework — what should work for this person and why.
• Every ad is tagged by segment and type, so performance rolls up to a rating rather than a list of ad names.

How it is used

• Green: scale and make variants. Amber: re-cut the hook or the position. Red: retire the type for that segment.
• Reported weekly with the day-to-day contact; feeds the next production sprint directly.
• Insights travel: a green for True & Co becomes the first hypothesis for Warners.

Included in the proposed scope

• Creative strategy, testing framework and weekly creative reporting.
• Video editing and static creation from your asset libraries and our shoots.
• Sourcing and briefing UGC creators; hook and script writing.
• Product photography where needed for ads.

Handled by your team, or additional

• Creator commercial agreements and sending product.
• Brand campaign shoots and non-ad content (site, packaging, wholesale materials).
• Affiliate is out of scope — but it overlaps with our creator work: the UGC creators we source and brief can be set up on affiliate codes and links, so paid creative and affiliate share the same people and content.
• Optional PM time for the launch — the only hard cost on top of commission.

Required inputs (by date)

• w/c 14 Sep — signed agreement; admin access to Meta, Google Ads, Merchant Center, Shopify, GA4; Triple Whale connected.
• w/c 14 Sep — brand guidelines, product and lifestyle asset libraries, product feed, size/fit and returns policy.
• w/c 21 Sep — launch offer signed off; customer segments and product truths validated with your team; creator product sends approved.
• w/c 28 Sep — staging site available for tracking QA; final launch date and stock levels confirmed.
• Throughout — Canva approvals within 24–48 hours so production never stalls.

Risks we are managing

• Site or tracking slips — tracking is QA’d on staging from w/c 28 Sep; if the site slips, ads hold and no spend is wasted.
• Approval bottleneck — drip-feed approvals in Canva from week 2, not one big sign-off in week 4.
• No conversion data at launch — brand search + broad Meta prospecting first; non-brand search and smart bidding only once data exists.
• Launch offer weak or late — we recommend a value-add launch offer agreed by w/c 21 Sep; creative is built around it.
• Learning-phase volatility — budgets step up +20–25% a day only when CPA holds; daily reviews for the first 14 days.

Success measures