Pila-Barre
Pila-Barre is an American apparel brand built around the Pilates and activewear space. They had real momentum: a loyal community, a founder with a natural on-camera presence, and a product that resonated. Their business was built on wholesale, retail, and marketplaces, and it was working.
What they didn't have was a DTC channel. No Meta ads, no TikTok ads, no email flows, and online store revenue that represented just 20% of their total business.
When we onboarded Pila-Barre in September, 2025, the starting point was essentially zero on the paid side. They had never run Meta or TikTok ads. Their email program was minimal. Online store represented just 20% of their total revenue.
The opportunity was clear, but so was the risk. This was a founder-led brand accustomed to organic growth, and we were asking them to invest in paid channels that had never been tested for them. We needed to prove incrementality before asking them to scale.
Our North Star from day one: acquire new customers at under $20 CAC. Not ROAS, not platform metrics. Only real, new customers at a profitable rate.
Starting With What Already Worked
Pila-Barre had something most brands pay a lot of money to manufacture: authentic, founder-led content that was already converting organically. The founder shot everything herself, and it resonated.
We didn't create a single ad asset. Instead, we took what was already working organically and put it in front of a targeted audience that looked like their best customers. Content that converts organically will convert with paid distribution, you just need to find the right audience.
A Sequenced Launch Strategy
Because Pila-Barre operates in apparel with limited inventory runs (often 200 to 300 units per SKU) maximizing sell-through on each drop was critical. We built a tight, repeatable launch sequence around every product release:
- 9 AM – 1 PM: Organic launch to existing audience
- 1 PM – 3 PM: Email and SMS campaign to non-organic subscribers
- 5 PM: Paid ads activate to cold audiences with remaining inventory
If a SKU sold out before ads launched, we shifted budget immediately to evergreen SKUs. No wasted spend, no ads running against out-of-stock products. The communication with the client was tight throughout, we moved together in real time.
Building Out Email from Scratch
Email was untapped. We built out the flows and campaigns from the ground up; starting with 5 campaigns a month, then 10, then more as the results made the case for volume. Every email was product-focused, consistent with the brand's visual identity, and timed around their launch schedule.
Layering in TikTok
Once Meta was proving out, we added TikTok ads by repurposing content Pila-Barre was already creating for TikTok Shop. We started at roughly 10% of the total budget. It worked well enough that we began shifting more over.
The Results
Q4: Proof of Concept
We ramped from zero to $30,000/month in Facebook spend across Q4. The numbers came in ahead of the target.
In November, a high-demand period with Black Friday, we drove 1,800 new customers at a $17 CAC. December was even stronger: over 2,000 new customers acquired, still under $20, during the gifting season. That's the best month they'd ever had, on their best metric.
Online Store Becomes the #1 Channel
The more important story was what happened to their overall business. Before we started, online store represented about 20% of total revenue. By Q4, it had climbed to 50%. In the months that followed, it settled around 40%. But more importantly, online store became their single largest revenue channel, surpassing wholesale entirely.
What they generated through their online store in Q4 alone surpassed their entire previous year of online store revenue.
Email Revenue: $1K a Week to $25K a Week
Email went from an afterthought to a major revenue driver. Over the course of the engagement, weekly email revenue grew from around $1,000 to $25,000. The more volume they sent, the more it grew. Which is why 5 emails a month became 10, and 10 became more.
The Business-Level Numbers
In the year before we engaged, Pila-Barre was doing a fraction of what they're doing today.
After we came in they more than quadrupled their annual revenue. Two months into 2026, and they are already on pace to more than triple that again.
We played a large part in that. Not the only part as they had great products and great content, but we proudly built the channel that made the difference.
What We Learned
1. Organic reach is a paid superpower
Brands that have strong organic content are sitting on a paid advantage they don't know they have.
You don't always need a creative team. You need distribution. Founder-led content that resonates with 10,000 followers will resonate with 100,000 if you put it in front of the right people.
2. Sequencing matters as much as spending
For inventory-constrained brands, the order of operations is a strategy. Organic first, email second, paid last. Let your warmest audience buy at full price before you spend money acquiring strangers. It maximizes revenue per SKU and keeps your ad dollars efficient.
3. CAC is the honest metric
ROAS is easy to inflate. New customer acquisition cost is not. By anchoring everything to nCAC under $20, we kept the work grounded in what actually matters: are we bringing in new customers at a rate this business can sustain and build on?
4. Sometimes the best outcome is outgrowing the agency
We did such a thorough job building out their systems (the targeting, the launch schedule, the email flows, the budget framework) that eventually they didn't need our level of specialization to maintain what we built. They're now hiring internally and managing it themselves.
That's not a failure. That's the job done right. Not every brand needs a full-service agency forever. We came in, proved the channel, built the infrastructure, and handed over a business that was materially larger and more diversified than the one we found.
We're proud of that, even if it means letting go.
The Takeaway
Pila-Barre didn't need us to reinvent anything. They needed someone to take what was already working and build the infrastructure to scale it.
In five months, we helped grow their online business by over 200%, turned their online store into their #1 revenue channel, and set them on a path toward $5M. They came in with nothing DTC. They left with everything.
If you're sitting on a brand with real potential and haven't cracked DTC yet, book a free strategy call.
We'll look at where you are, where the opportunity is, and what it would actually take to get there.
