Performance ads, SEO and conversion work that returned 3–4x on ad spend for Pestle & Mortar Clothing, with new customers making up 60%+ of buyers.

Pestle & Mortar Clothing is a streetwear label with a loyal following — and a loyal following brings its own paid-media trap. When a brand’s most engaged fans already know the drops, the easiest thing for an ad account to do is keep selling to them. The reported return looks healthy, but much of that revenue would have arrived anyway, and the brand stops growing beyond the circle that already knows it. Streetwear makes this harder. Shoppers buy into a story and an identity as much as a garment, so a cold audience needs more than a product shot before it will commit, and the category is crowded with local labels, regional marketplaces and global brands all bidding for the same style interests. A drop-led calendar adds pressure: each release has a short window to find its buyers before attention moves on. The opportunity was to make paid media do the harder job — reach genuinely new customers profitably, rather than paying again for the ones the brand already had.

Grow the customer base through paid media without giving up profitability. Success was defined in sales terms: a return on ad spend strong enough to justify scaling budget; a store that converted a healthy share of the visitors the campaigns paid for; and, most importantly, a high proportion of orders coming from first-time buyers rather than repeat fans, so that the revenue the campaigns reported was revenue the brand would not otherwise have earned. The three were planned together — acquisition brings new shoppers in, conversion turns more of them into orders, and the new-customer share keeps the whole programme honest about where growth is actually coming from.

We ran performance campaigns across Meta and Google Shopping and Search, each with a defined role. Meta carried prospecting — built around the stories behind each collection rather than bare product shots, so a shopper who had never heard of the label understood why the pieces existed before being asked to buy one. Existing customers and recent purchasers were excluded from prospecting audiences, so acquisition budget was spent on people the brand had not yet reached. Shopping and Search captured demand already in the market: shoppers searching for the label, its collections and the kinds of streetwear it is known for. The product feed and campaign structure were managed around each drop, so spend followed the pieces and sizes that were in stock and selling. Retargeting ran against product viewers and cart abandoners, bringing back new shoppers who had shown clear interest but not yet committed.

Alongside the paid work we built out SEO for the branded and category searches the label should own, giving new shoppers a route in with no media cost attached. On site, we worked through website and conversion optimisation with the first-time buyer in mind: product pages that answered sizing, fit and fabric questions up front, the story behind each collection kept close to the buy button, delivery and exchange terms surfaced early, and friction removed from the cart and checkout. Email capture and lifecycle sequences, paired with retargeting, kept first-time visitors and new customers engaged between drops so that the audience the campaigns paid to reach stayed within reach.

Over six to seven months the campaigns returned 3–4x on ad spend, the store converted between 2.5% and 3% of visitors, and new customers accounted for 60%+ of buyers — growth that came from shoppers the brand had not reached before, not from re-selling to its existing fans.

See the rest of our client work on the case studies page.