Hand-dyed yarn brand · Craft, DTC

Getting the yarn into their hands.

New customers for a small-batch dye studio whose regulars reorder every month, without teaching anyone to wait for a sale.

26%

of revenue missing from GA4, so paid was read from the store's own orders

38%

smaller baskets on birthday-gift orders, across 740 orders in 13 months

~40%

the most Meta could claim of August's first-time customers, by its own count

sales a year allowed to be predictable: Memorial Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday

6% of gift orders were first orders

First-ever orders among 740 birthday-gift redemptions over 13 months

This hand-dyed yarn brand lives on its regulars (79% of revenue in the six months to July), and new customers were getting harder to find. My revenue model on two years of orders matched the store exactly for June and July. An audit found GA4 was missing 26% of revenue, so I read paid results from the store's own orders.

People choose yarn by feel, so I treated getting it into someone's hands as the acquisition event and priced each offer against what a new customer cost in ads. A free pattern looked cheapest, but most patterns pay the designer about half the list price per copy, and a giveaway wins on cost per lead. We agreed to judge offers on cost per first purchase.

The offer is one free DK mini, in a colorway they can reorder. My first draft said no code was needed, which would have broken fulfilment: shipping works from the order, so the mini would be missed. The agreed fix is an email link that puts the mini in the cart with the code applied. For creators, I advised a fixed rate and a brand-owned landing page, so those customers stay with the brand.

The birthday gift: It was running as an ad to new people, but only 6% of 740 redemptions over 13 months were first-ever orders, and those baskets were 38% smaller than the store average because the gift had no minimum. Its signup page also used the wrong form, so people who signed up joined no list and never got a welcome email.
Reading paid: Meta could match 65 to 76% of the purchaser list, so about a third of existing customers can't be excluded from acquisition ads, and the cost per new customer it reports looks better than it is. In September, ads to people who already buy were credited with about 60% of Meta-attributed revenue on 23% of the spend.

Revenue model matched to store orders
Offers judged on cost per first purchase
Only 3 predictable sales a year

Acquisition Paid Promotions

The question

“How do I win new customers for a niche brand without training them to wait for a discount?”

The assignment

On Monday, export every order from the last 12 months that used your free-gift code. Compare its average order with your store average and count how many were someone's first order. If the baskets are small and the first orders are few, put a minimum on the gift and aim it at lapsed customers instead of cold ads.

The brand ran its own ad campaigns and raised spend over the same months, so the rise in first-time customers is shared work. The free-mini landing page was still in copy review in October.

Yewgo client work, orchestrated by me end to end: strategy, measurement, offer design and the flows. The brand runs its own ads and fulfilment.

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