Objet
Growth that had stopped being growth
A DTC skincare brand adding customers quickly and losing them faster. Rebuilt the retention economics until acquisition became affordable again.
- Sector
- Clinical skincare
- Duration
- 11 months
- Disciplines
- Lifecycle & CRM · Analytics · Content & Search
Results
- Repeat purchase rate
- 19% → 44%Within 11 months
- Customer lifetime value
- +71%12-month cohort basis
- CAC payback
- 4.2moFrom 9.8 months
- Revenue from subscription
- 38%From 6%
Objet reached contribution-margin profitability in month eight of the engagement, on lower acquisition spend than the year before. The retention work made the next funding conversation a materially different one.
01 — The challenge
Objet had raised on a growth curve that was, on closer inspection, a treadmill. New customer acquisition was up sixty percent year over year and contribution margin was down. The brand had a strong clinical proposition and a repeat rate of nineteen percent — for a consumable product with a six-week replenishment cycle, that number should have been double. Every conversation in the business was about lowering CAC. The actual problem was on the other side of the equation: they were buying customers who left before they paid for themselves.
02 — The strategy
Move the argument from CAC to payback
A CAC number in isolation cannot be evaluated. We rebuilt the model around contribution margin and payback period by cohort and acquisition channel, which immediately showed that two channels the team considered efficient were producing customers who never made a second order.
Solve the replenishment moment
The product ran out at around six weeks and nothing happened. Predicted-depletion timing, a genuinely useful routine-guidance programme, and a subscription offer positioned around results rather than savings turned the largest leak in the business into its most reliable revenue line.
Own the questions, not the keywords
Skincare search is now mediated by answer engines summarising the top results rather than sending traffic to them. We restructured content around the clinical questions the brand was uniquely qualified to answer, with the citation structure that gets a brand quoted rather than absorbed.
03 — What was built
- Cohort-level contribution margin and payback modelling by channel
- Replenishment programme keyed to predicted depletion by product and usage rate
- Subscription redesign — repositioned from discount mechanic to results programme
- 22-flow lifecycle rebuild with behavioural and skin-concern segmentation
- Clinical content library rebuilt for answer engine citation and entity coverage
- Paid spend reallocated away from two channels with negative 12-month contribution
“Everyone we spoke to wanted to talk about our ad account. Anna was the only person who asked to see the cohort data first, and that turned out to be the entire problem.”