PAID ADS CASE STUDY:
A date night paint kit brand was stuck in post-Christmas buyer fatigue with a limited creative pipeline. We sourced new creators, tested 7 persona angles, and ran an aggressive pre-holiday testing sprint — turning Valentine’s Day into their biggest sales event ever, beating Black Friday and Christmas.
This brand — a date night paint kit company — had been growing year over year, but the growth was hitting a ceiling. They’d cycled through an agency they weren’t happy with, and the founder had stepped back into the paid ads seat to course correct. When they came to us in June 2025, the creative pipeline was thin, the targeting was narrow, and the approach leaned heavily on feature-focused image ads.
By January, the post-Christmas slump was real. Buyer fatigue had set in, and Valentine’s Day — their most important season — was weeks away. The window to test, learn, and scale was closing fast.
The goal heading into February: ramp spend to $17K/day, walk it up to $19K near the last shipping cutoff, and hold a 3.5x NC-ROAS blended the whole way. We ended up peaking at $28K/day — and beat every target they set.
The strategy came down to three bets: fresh creators, persona testing, and starting earlier than planned. Each one compounded the others.
We sourced 2 UGC creators (the owner brought on 3 more) and briefed them around the real pain points couples face with date night — decision fatigue, staying in vs. going out, and the frustration girlfriends feel when their partner doesn’t put in effort. We produced 15–20 creatives mixing evergreen and Valentine’s-specific angles across both images and videos.
The brand’s format of demoing the process of a date night became our go-to framework. The key insight: it was the scripts that drove performance early on, not the production value. Evergreen angles actually took off before the holiday-specific ones did.
15–20 new creatives produced with fresh UGC creators, up from a handful of recycled assets
Instead of targeting one broad “date night couple” audience, we broke it into 7 distinct personas — each representing a different motivation to buy. We tested 3 scripts per persona, each tackling a different emotional driver. Then we validated winners based on spend and performance metrics.
3 winning personas identified — unlocking new audiences the brand had never reached before
We launched evergreen and Valentine’s-specific ads around January 5th — earlier than originally planned. This gave us nearly a full month to test painting designs, angles, and creative formats before the spend really mattered. We ran at least 15 variations across images and videos.
The testing phase told us which painting designs resonated most, which angles had the strongest hooks, and which personas had real scaling potential. By February 1st, we knew exactly where to put the money.
15+ creative variations tested before peak season — winners identified and ready to scale on day one
All ads ran on Meta with primarily ABO campaigns and broad targeting. We also ran a separate lookalike audience campaign where we’d graduate winners from testing as another form of scaling. Budget increased day over day as testing ad sets proved themselves — no retargeting, just strong front-end creative doing the heavy lifting.
Daily spend ramped from $17K to a peak of $28K/day. On February 7th, we had to start pulling back — not because performance dipped, but because inventory was running out.
$292K spent on Meta at 3.69x ROAS — peaked at $28K/day, beating original $19K target by 47%
This Valentine’s push didn’t just beat last year — it rewrote the record book for the brand.
From February 3rd to the 11th, the brand strung together 8 consecutive days above $100K in sales — something they’d never done before. Date night kits were the top seller, followed by kids kits and individual paintings. They could have kept going, but inventory constraints forced the pullback earlier than needed.
For a date night paint kit brand, Valentine’s Day should be the Super Bowl. This year, it finally was.
New UGC creators paired with the brand’s best-selling painting designs gave the audience something they hadn’t seen before. That novelty translated directly into higher engagement and more scalable creatives.
In previous years, the brand doubled down on holiday-specific ads — then hit a wall when the season ended. This time we ran a balanced mix. The evergreen angles actually took off first, and they’ll keep working long after February.
Breaking “date night couples” into 7 distinct personas — each with their own motivators — meant we weren’t just reaching more people, we were reaching different people. The Stay-In Preference persona alone became a $99K spend winner.
Starting creative tests in early January gave us more runway to find winners. By the time February hit, we knew exactly which ads to pour budget into. No guessing, no scrambling.
This brand went from post-holiday fatigue to their biggest sales period ever — $1.28M in 14 days — by investing in creative diversity, persona testing, and an early testing sprint that left nothing to chance. They hit their first-ever $100K+ days, ran 8 of them back to back, and only stopped scaling because they ran out of inventory.
The playbook isn’t complicated. Source fresh creative. Test personas, not just audiences. Start earlier than you think you need to. And when the data tells you something is working, don’t hesitate — scale it.
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We help e-commerce brands turn seasonal pushes into record-breaking revenue through creative strategy and paid ads.
