Launching Mother Root from 0 → 1
6 → 7 figures
Grown DTC business from low six to high seven figures of revenue
Profitable
Built around profitable targets and unit economics
Retail foundations
Digital advertising has built strong foundations for retail
Launched in the US
Early market testing and then launching the brand into the US
Mother Root is a non-alcoholic aperitif brand — founded in 2018, by former wine trade professional Bethan Wallace Higson. By the start of 2023, they had built a strong retail and trade business, but had hit a plateau with direct to consumer, unsure of how big the opportunity could be.
The brief: prove how big DTC could be while maintaining strong unit economics and profitability at its core.
1) Always-on experimentation
We built a test cadence that never switches off: hypotheses → experiments → learnings → new tests. We launched 1,500+ creative experiments and counting, designed to compound rather than simply inflate volume.
2) Creative diversity
We took care with Mother Root’s meticulously considered look and feel in their brand ads, alongside feed-native work based on exhaustive customer research. The output aimed to maximise creative diversity so the brand could speak to different jobs-to-be-done and stages of awareness across a huge range of formats and styles.
3) Full-funnel media system
Introduced a proper awareness → conversion structure on Meta , so we could earn cheaper reach up top and harvest intent further down.
4) Landing pages as a growth lever
Moved acquisition from generic PDPs to JTBD landing pages matched to the message and moment, so spend pushed into a page built to convert.
5) Turn brand moments into performance
Treated big moments as performance assets, with a rapid-response pipeline (e.g. 100+ creative assets live within 30 days of Mother Root’s Dragons’ Den appearance) and devised strategies for limited-edition drops to convert spikes into sustained momentum.
6) Measure for confidence
Used a complete suite of measurement tools from correlation modelling through to marketing mix models, as well as geo-based and audience-based experiments to validate performance. All focused on profitability and incrementality throughout.
As a result of this work, we have helped cement Mother Root as one of the most recognised non-alc drinks in market
Spend is up 3× YoY
CPMs are down 25%
CVR is up 25%
Meta similarity score of 0.18
Contribution margins were protected
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Mother Root were early in adopting growth principles: customer-centricity and research, rapid experimentation, and leaning into platform-native thinking. The result was based on heavily reflecting the customer in our advertising.