D2C Brand — Performance Marketing
A four-month full-funnel performance marketing program for a Gwalior-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand — taking them from marketplace dependency to a profitable owned-channel business with 4.5x return on ad spend and 12,000+ orders shipped.
The Challenge
The brand had built an eight-figure top line almost entirely on Amazon and Flipkart — and was paying for it. Marketplace commissions, sponsored-ad fees and aggressive price competition had compressed net margins to under 6%, and every algorithm tweak or fee hike on the marketplace directly hit the P&L. They had no real owned traffic, no email list worth speaking of, and a Shopify storefront that was getting fewer than 300 sessions a month.
Brand recall outside the marketplace listing page was effectively zero. Their previous agency had burned ₹6 lakh in Meta ads over a single quarter with negative ROI — the campaigns ran broad audiences, generic creative, and no real conversion-tracking in place (the Facebook Pixel was double-firing, attribution was broken, and Google Analytics was missing ecommerce events entirely). The website itself was a stock Shopify theme that took 6.4 seconds to load on mobile and had no structured data, no review schema and no meaningful on-page SEO.
The founder's brief was blunt: they wanted to break marketplace dependency, build a profitable owned-channel revenue stream, and have transparent, attributable numbers they could trust — not vanity metrics. They had four months of runway to prove the model worked before committing to a full year of spend.
"We were making money on paper and losing it in the bank. Marketplace fees ate our margins, the last agency burned our budget on ads that didn't track, and we had no idea who our customer actually was. We needed owned revenue — fast — and numbers we could trust." — A____, Founder
Our Solution
Curio started not with ads but with tracking. We rebuilt the entire measurement stack — Google Tag Manager container, server-side tracking to bypass iOS ad-blockers, GA4 ecommerce events firing on every relevant action (view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase), Conversion API integration with Meta for first-party data match, and UTM hygiene enforced across every link. Only once we trusted the numbers did we touch a single rupee of ad spend — because every prior failure traced back to broken attribution.
In parallel, we rebuilt the storefront. The stock Shopify theme was replaced with a custom, performance-tuned Next.js storefront (Shopify headless) that cut mobile load time from 6.4s to 1.8s, added full Product, Review and FAQ schema markup, and shipped a conversion-rate-optimised PDP with sticky add-to-cart, social proof and bundle offers. We then ran a structured SEO program targeting branded + category long-tail keywords, publishing product-led content and building category pages optimised for high-intent commercial queries.
The paid media program was full-funnel: top-of-funnel Meta Reels and YouTube Shorts for cold audience reach, mid-funnel Meta catalog ads and Google Performance Max for product discovery, and bottom-funnel Google Shopping + branded Search with explicit retargeting of website visitors and email subscribers. Creative was iterated weekly against ROAS, CPA and contribution-margin targets — not against clicks. By month three we had shifted the budget mix decisively toward the highest-ROAS channels and scaled spend 2.4x while keeping blended ROAS above 4.
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Audit & TrackingGTM rebuild, server-side tracking, GA4 ecommerce events, Meta Conversion API, UTM hygiene and clean attribution baseline.
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Website & CROCustom Next.js storefront (Shopify headless), mobile load 6.4s → 1.8s, PDP redesign, Schema markup, bundle offers.
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Ad CampaignsFull-funnel Google Ads (Search, Shopping, PMax) + Meta Ads (Reels, Catalog, Retargeting), creative iterated weekly on ROAS.
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SEO & ContentBranded + category long-tail keyword program, product-led blog content, Schema, category-page optimisation.
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Scale & OptimizeBudget re-allocated to highest-ROAS channels, spend scaled 2.4x, weekly performance review with founder, lifecycle email flows.
Results & Impact
Over four months the brand moved from a 1.2x ROAS (effectively break-even after product cost) to a sustained 4.5x blended ROAS, with monthly owned-channel revenue tripling. More than 12,000 orders were shipped through the brand's own storefront — revenue that previously would have been routed (and taxed) through a marketplace. Cost-per-acquisition dropped 40% as creative, audience and channel mix matured, and the founder now opens a weekly dashboard with numbers they actually trust, because the attribution underneath is clean.
The compounding wins were on the owned side. SEO content started ranking — eight branded and category keywords now sit on page one of Google, including two in the top three positions, driving consistent organic traffic that costs nothing to maintain. Email and WhatsApp lifecycle flows (abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back) now contribute roughly 18% of monthly revenue at near-zero marginal cost. The storefront's mobile load time of 1.8s lifted the PDP conversion rate by 32% on its own — a change that pays back every single day, independent of ad spend.
"For the first time, our dashboard matches our bank account. Curio fixed the tracking first, then the website, then the ads — in that order — and the numbers speak for themselves. We finally have a brand that doesn't depend on Amazon's algorithm for survival." — A____, Founder
Services Used
Digital Marketing
Full-funnel Google + Meta ads, server-side tracking, creative iteration and weekly ROAS-led optimisation.
Explore serviceSEO Services
Branded + category keyword program, product-led content and Schema markup — page-1 rankings for 8 keywords.
Explore serviceWeb Development
Custom headless Next.js storefront on Shopify, mobile load 6.4s → 1.8s, CRO-tuned PDPs and Schema markup.
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