Project Details

Client

Harbour & Root

Location

Melbourne, AU

Engagement

Brand positioning + Content + Email + Social

Duration

7 months

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E-commerce and DTC

Brand positioning + Content + Email + Social

Reducing paid ad dependency by 40% while growing revenue for a skincare brand hitting a growth ceiling

Client names are fictional. An anonymity clause applies to all engagements on request.

The Situation

Harbour & Root, a natural skincare brand with a loyal customer base and strong product reviews, had built their entire growth model on Meta advertising. It worked, until iOS 14 changes degraded their attribution and rising CPMs started compressing margins. When they came to Adah, 81% of their new customer revenue was coming from paid social. Their email list had 22,000 subscribers they hadn't emailed in four months. Their organic social was inconsistent: a mix of product shots, reposts, and the occasional founder video that performed well but wasn't being replicated. Their website had no content strategy.

What We Did

We started by documenting their brand voice properly, working with the founder to capture the warmth, directness, and anti-greenwashing ethos that came through in her best content but wasn't being applied consistently across the brand. That became the filter for everything we produced. We rebuilt their email program from the ground up: a new welcome flow, a post-purchase sequence, a re-engagement campaign for the lapsed subscribers, and a monthly newsletter structured around education rather than promotion. Open rates went from 18% to 41% within three sends. We built a 12-month content calendar for organic social and the blog, anchored around their natural ingredients story and their founder's credibility as someone who'd reformulated the range twice before she was happy with it. The content was designed to build community and trust, not just announce products.

Brand voice documentation workshop
Email program rebuilt from scratch
12-month organic social content calendar
Blog content strategy built around natural skincare search terms

Results

Harbour & Root grew revenue by 34% while their paid ad spend stayed flat. Everything extra came from channels they already owned but weren't using properly.

40%

reduction in paid ad spend as % of revenue

41%

email open rate (up from 18%)

2.9x

repeat purchase rate improvement

The Outcome

Harbour & Root's revenue grew by 34% over the seven months while their paid ad spend stayed flat. The growth came entirely from owned channels: email, organic social, and the blog, which now drives consistent traffic and converts at a rate the founder describes as 'better than paid ever was at the same stage of the funnel.' They've since reduced their Meta budget by 40% without a revenue impact.

“

We'd been throwing money at Meta because we didn't know what else to do. Adah showed us that we were sitting on a great email list we'd been ignoring, a brand story we weren't telling properly, and an audience that was ready to engage if we just showed up consistently. The numbers speak for themselves.

— Founder, Harbour & Root

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