The brief
An established wellness manufacturer was launching a new premium DTC brand into Europe. The product range was finished, manufacturing was committed, and the founder had a target of being live in five markets — UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden — in time for the autumn category window. The work the brand needed was end-to-end go-to-market: positioning, packaging refinement, creative production, paid-media programme, analytics, and the operational connective tissue to make all of that work across five jurisdictions. Engagement length was three months to launch plus ongoing management.
What was already decided
Important to note what was outside our scope: the product itself, the manufacturing partner, and the choice to go DTC rather than retail-first. We were not asked to validate any of these and we did not. The strategic question we did engage on was the choice of five markets simultaneously rather than two-then-three; we recommended a sequenced approach but the founder’s judgement on time-to-market won, and on reflection she was right.
Phase one: positioning and packaging
Six weeks of work on the brand-foundation layer that the paid-media programme would build on. Positioning landed in the “quiet wellness” space — deliberately distinct from the bright-colour, performative wellness brands that dominate the category. Packaging was reworked for the European market: simpler typography, better readability under retail-shelf lighting (in case retail came later), and material choices that aligned with the brand’s sustainability claims without being preachy about it.
Phase two: creative production
A two-week production sprint covering still photography, motion creative, and the foundational copy that would feed into Performance Max asset libraries, Meta ad sets, and the website. Roughly 280 still images, 24 video assets at four aspect ratios each, and a copy library of 60 headlines and 40 descriptions. The volume was deliberate: PMax and Meta both reward asset-library breadth, and we wanted the launch to start with a saturated creative supply rather than running out in week three.
Phase three: launch
Five markets, simultaneous go-live. The paid-media stack was deliberately uniform across markets to keep operational complexity manageable: per market, one Google Shopping campaign, one Performance Max campaign, one Meta retargeting campaign, one Meta prospecting campaign. Localisation was handled at the asset level (translations by native-language copywriters in each market) rather than at the campaign-structure level. Conversion tracking was unified through a single GA4 property with market segmentation, with server-side tagging and Enhanced conversions live from day one.
The numbers
First-year revenue across the five markets: £3.4 million, against a year-one plan of £2.6 million. Blended return on ad spend: 2.6, comfortably above the contribution-margin breakeven of 1.8 the founder had built into the unit economics. The UK market was largest by absolute revenue; Germany was the highest ROAS market by some margin. Performance varied across markets in ways that mostly reflected category-spend levels by competitor brands rather than anything we’d done differently in any specific market.
What worked
The over-investment in creative supply paid off. We did not run out of fresh assets in any market in the first six months, which avoided the creative-fatigue dip that typically hits month four of a launch. The decision to keep the campaign architecture identical across markets meant our team could operate all five with the same playbook, and the senior buyer’s attention scaled across all five rather than getting distributed across five different operational patterns.
What we’d do differently
The Sweden market underperformed and in retrospect we should have flagged it during the planning phase: the category in Sweden is dominated by a small number of incumbent retail players with strong direct relationships, and DTC penetration is structurally lower. The economics of running a single small-market campaign were marginal and the operational cost of maintaining a fifth market for the lifetime of the engagement was not trivial. Our recommendation now would have been four markets at launch, with Sweden re-evaluated at year two. The founder agreed on review.