Case 01 · Full-funnel growth · 2023 - Present
Stella's Studios: full-funnel growth on a founder's budget.
I founded an illustration-led apparel brand and ran every part of its growth myself, from the first ad to the retention email. £50K+ in year one, with no team and no agency.
- Role
- Founder · growth, paid social & creative
- Timeline
- 2023 - Present
- Channels
- TikTok, Instagram, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Pinterest, Google, email
- Tools
- Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads, Klaviyo, Shopify, GA4, Search Console
£50K+
First-year revenue
£16.7K
Peak month
10K+
Followers from zero
2,000+
Email subscribers
01
Context
Stella's Studios is a print-on-demand D2C brand selling tees and illustrated goods through Shopify. Every design is hand-illustrated by me. With no budget for an agency or a large paid programme, growth had to come from spending small, measuring closely and putting money behind what was already working.
02
The growth engine
Acquisition
- Trend-aware, product-led TikTok and Instagram content published daily, growing TikTok followers by 200%+ (3,900+) in five months and driving 2m+ organic views.
- Meta and TikTok ads tested around launches, covering creative, audiences, budget pacing and reporting, with the Meta Pixel and conversion tracking set up myself.
- Creator seeding with an individual discount code per creator, so I could measure sales rather than just reach. I also turned down free-product requests from creators who didn't fit the brand.
- Joint giveaways with other small brands to reach each other's audiences.
- Pinterest content that went organically viral several times, plus Shopify SEO built on Search Console keyword research.
Conversion
- Ran and optimised the Shopify store, including on-site pop-ups to capture email sign-ups.
- Migrated the whole website onto Shopify in a single day when the brand outgrew its previous platform, with no disruption to trading.
Retention
- Built the email list to 2,000+ on Shopify Email, then moved to Klaviyo when the list outgrew it, running welcome, launch, promotional and retention flows.
- A/B tested email campaigns in Klaviyo.
- Ran an ambassador programme on a 10% commission structure, presenting sales figures to potential ambassadors to show what they could earn.
03
Decisions I made from the data
The Christmas hoodie pivot.
Hoodies were underperforming against expectations mid-campaign. GA4 showed a male gift-buying audience I hadn't planned for, so I reframed the marketing around tees as gifts for men. It converted.
Winning the Salad Days stall.
Battersea Power Station's Salad Days Market is notoriously hard to get into. I used pre-order and page-view data to prove demand for my Euros drop, offered an exclusive early launch at the stall, and got the space.
Cancelling a shoot.
Two weeks before a planned Women's Euros shoot, social demand signals for the design were low, so I cancelled it rather than spend on content the audience hadn't asked for.
Going online-only.
After running physical market stalls, I weighed stock risk against return and kept the print-on-demand model online-only, turning down further market and stockist enquiries.
Protecting margin.
Negotiated a stockist's consignment commission down from 30% to 20%, and negotiated rates directly with models and photographers for shoots.
04
Results
- £50,000+ revenue in the first year.
- £16.7K in the peak month (March - April 2024).
- 2m+ views across social content.
- TikTok followers up 200%+ (3,900+) in five months.
- 2,000+ email subscribers.
- Euros 2024: 100+ units on launch morning and 37.8% of that week's revenue from one product line.
05
What I'd do with a team and a bigger budget
More structured testing: more creative variants per test, cleaner comparisons and enough budget to give every ad set a fair run through the learning phase. The instincts are there. I want the scale and the people to sharpen them against.
