One of Australia’s biggest beauty retailers , Oz Hair and Beauty launched its online website in 2012. After market domination in the Women’s Hair and Beauty industry, it was time for a mens alternative. The founders saw an opportunity to create a space for like minded men who understand the importance of looking good and staying well groomed, and Above The Collar was born.
We met Founder Dean Nappa at the start of 2022 and he’d be working with the same agency that Oz Hair & Beauty were with at the time. He was unhappy with the poor results and lack of creative flair and found himself constantly needing to provide creatives in order for his agency to try new things.
Old school media buying tactics were being deployed with little to no effect, and the agency seemed to completely disregard social media as a viable channel for the business.
The logic from previous agencies had merit – “focus on an intent based Google strategy instead of paid social as the store has hundreds of products”
But how does a new brand compete with the biggest online retailers in such a crowded space? We immediately saw the opportunity to open up top of funnel prospecting using Meta to drive awareness for the brand as a true “one stop shop” for men’s grooming.
In Just 60 days, we delivered ATC’s first record month. This set off a chain reaction of unprecedented monthly revenue figures, with each month surpassing the last.
Dive into this case study to discover the innovative tactics and creative strategies that drove record growth for Above The Collar.
With hundreds of products on their store, it was impossible to run creative testing on every best seller with the budget we had available. So we decided to go after the key categories within the mens grooming space (i.e hairloss, fragrances, skincare) and position ATC as a “secret hack” for men’s grooming
We rolled out initial tests with the secret hack hooks which ended up becoming our best performing ads for over a year. Within the creatives, we showed each of the best selling products that related to each category & found that this was a great way of showcasing the product range while introducing men to a better way to shop online.
Key Learnings: Men prefer simple, all-in-one solutions and these angles made it feel pain free to shop for solutions for skincare and hairloss which they may have not know about before.
We needed to implement a process to create & iterate on best performing creatives, fast! The account had no creative testing history as the previous agency was going all-in on catalogue campaigns, so we stepped in and immediately implemented a creative testing process to iterate on:
Key Learnings: Unlike alot of other brands, UGC performed worse than statics and motion graphic videos. We quickly learnt that in order to compete with other online retailers and brands, we had to focus on high value bundles and offers and these were best translated using stills and motion graphics.
Focusing on statics and motion graphics allowed us to reduce the feedback loop in our creative testing rather than waiting weeks for new UGC to come in. This help us identify winning data on the 4 points above that allowed us to start scaling in month 2.
With the introduction of Performance Max, we saw an incredible opportunity to simplify the Google ad account and implement current best practices to reduce wasted spend.
We turned down the spend on branded campaigns and moved budget out of standard shopping into performance max, using our winning creatives from Meta in our performance max asset groups to drive more conversions and higher CTR through display & Youtube.
The highest impact changes that resulted from the Google restructure were:
Key Learnings: Account simplification was the key to scaling Google. We took the account from 11 campaigns when we started down to 3, with Pmax taking the majority of spend. As we scaled on Meta, performance on Google closely followed as more people were aware of ATC as a solution for their needs.
312%
Revenue Growth (Year on Year)
257%
Decrease In CPA in the first 90 days
463%
increase in ROAS in the first 90 days
Whether you’re scaling to $1M/month or heading towards a $100M+ valuation.
Defiant becomes your unfair advantage in creative, media, and performance.
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