Case Study · Luxury Apparel · Multi-Year Partnership

How a Founder-Led Cashmere Brand Grew into a Profitable, Exit-Ready DTC Business.

A small luxury knitwear brand with a great product, cult-level customer love, and no obvious lever for predictable scale. We were that lever. Multi-year partnership. Profitable every year. Acquired in late 2025.

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2.5x+

NC-ROAS at Scale

Sustained, not a single-month spike

+30%

BFCM Revenue YoY

Black Friday 2024 vs. 2023

TV Test Return

On a $25K new channel test

Acquired

Exit Outcome

Brand acquired in late 2025

The Challenge

Cashmere Is a Hard Category to Grow Profitably.

Our client is a direct-to-consumer luxury knitwear brand built around 100% cashmere essentials. Founder-led and inventory-disciplined, the brand competes against much larger, VC-backed players by leaning into product quality, sharp price points, and a loyal repeat customer base. When we started working together, the brand had a strong product story but a small ad footprint and limited creative pipeline.

Seasonality is brutal. Q3 and Q4 carry the year. Spring and summer is a cotton story at best. Get the seasonal handoff wrong and you bleed a quarter of cash.

Inventory is finite and expensive. Top sellers regularly sold out. Pulling spend on out-of-stock SKUs and redirecting to the next best performer was a weekly, sometimes daily, exercise.

CPMs and CAC kept rising. Like every fashion DTC brand, the client was fighting iOS changes, Meta algorithm shifts, and rising auction costs across every channel.

Tariffs hit the cost stack. A 25% tariff on Chinese imports forced rapid sourcing changes and put pressure on margin, which meant ad efficiency mattered even more.

Lean creative team. A founder-led brand with one in-house creator doing most of the on-camera and lifestyle content. Whatever we ran, we had to make stretch.

The bar wasn't “grow at any cost.” It was “grow profitably, every month, against a target MER, with the cash discipline of a real operating business.”

What We Did

Six Systems That Ran Like an Operating System.

Built a Paid Media System, Not a Campaign

Optimized to NC-ROAS and NCPA, not blended dashboard ROAS. Targets locked in around 2.5x+ NC-ROAS, sub-$100 CAC, sub-$120 NCPA.
Held a target MER of roughly 35% in fall and sub-40% year-round. When MER drifted, we pulled back the same day.
Budgets moved daily and intraday based on real-time signal. On strong days, we scaled spend past $8K with a 6.36 ROAS on the way to $10K to $15K days.
Simplified the ad account so Meta could actually learn, separating cashmere from cotton at the campaign level.

Treated Creative as the Targeting

Once we identified that the brand's recurring on-camera creator outperformed product-only shots, we doubled down. Lifestyle creative routinely returned multiples of the ROAS of product-only ads.
High-velocity testing: different colorways and silhouettes each took turns winning weeks. We gave the algorithm 3 to 5 fresh angles every cycle.
Format diversity: statics, gimbal product video, UGC re-edits with voiceover, carousels, and flatlay revivals all earned spend on merit.
AI-assisted, not AI-looking. We used AI to accelerate scripting and editing without letting ads slip into the obviously synthetic look that kills luxury credibility.

Made the Website Convert

Best-seller and crew-neck collection pages converted at >4%, with the homepage sitting around 4.5%.
Pinned hero SKUs on collection pages, A/B tested PDP vs. collection-page destinations, and surfaced top-converting visuals at the top of landing pages.
Worked with the founder on a full site rebuild that launched after Labor Day 2025.

Made Email Do Its Real Job

Flows generated ~50% of total email revenue. Welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back automations carried the program.
Segmented audiences by cashmere vs. cotton buyers and used those lists to seed Meta lookalikes, tightening the loop between owned and paid.

Opened a New Channel: TV

In Q4 2024, tested a $25K TV investment as a new acquisition lever.
The campaign returned roughly 4x, opening a top-of-funnel channel that didn't exist in the marketing mix before.
Gave a new layer of reach against the brand's actual core buyer.

Co-Piloted a Real Business, Not Just an Ad Account

Week-to-week work included forecasting, MER targets, cash flow planning around inventory drops, fall transition timelines, and wholesale order impact on attribution.
Sourcing decisions when tariffs hit. We worked out of the same Slack channel as the founder, every day.
Daily decisions like 'pull back spend, MER is at 92%' or 'push back to $20K/day, we have credit room and inventory' happened in Slack with full transparency.

Results

Profit-Led Scale, Sustained Over Years. Then an Exit.

Ad spend grew into $65K+/month while staying inside MER targets

NC-ROAS held above 2.5x at scale, CAC under $100, NCPA under $120

Peak window: $33,985 spent in 7 days at target NC-ROAS

Black Friday 2024 grew 30% YoY

$25K TV test returned ~4x, opening a new acquisition channel

Monthly fall targets of $550K–$650K hit consistently

August 2025 on track to be the second-best month in brand history

Klaviyo flows delivered ~50% of email revenue

Brand acquired in late 2025

Not a single hero month or a vanity ROAS screenshot. A small, founder-led DTC brand that grew into a profitable, predictable, exit-ready business.

The new ownership group brought in their own team and took over the ad accounts directly within 48 hours of the transition. That is the outcome we build for.

Why It Worked

Five Things That Mattered More Than Any Single Tactic.

Real partnership. We worked the account like it was ours. Forecasting, inventory, sourcing, cash flow, all of it. Not just ad ops.

Profit discipline. Net-new ROAS, MER, and CAC were the scoreboard. Vanity metrics weren't.

Creative as the lever. The same product can flatline with the wrong creative and break out with the right one. We made sure it was the latter.

Daily operating cadence. Slack-first communication, daily budget surfing, and weekly strategy syncs meant nothing sat for a week.

Multi-year horizon. Compounding only works if you stick around. We did.

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