Most case studies are about the amazing results that an agency gets for a brand they worked with. But I think that’s a bit silly. Case studies are the small bits of data that you want to show concerning how amazing your work was with a brand.

That doesn’t actually share any good insights as to working with a specific agency or how your workflow is. So in this case study I plan to share with you the ups and downs since we started working with Michael (founder of Flewd) along with specific examples that should help you understand how we work.

My aim is to go as deep as our partnerships usually go.

This case study will share with you his previous experiences with agencies in the past, as well as what went well when we started together (over 3 years ago) and what we believe is working now.

I won’t lie to you. My goal in you reading this is to make you do 1 of 2 things:

• Fall in love with how we work with our clients so you feel the need to apply to work with our team
• Realize that working with us is a terrible idea and we’re not a good fit

I don’t mind what bucket you fit into. I would prefer to filter out the individuals who aren’t a good fit so we can make sure we find the partners we can work with for years. Here’s Flewd’s (and really, Michael’s) “case study”

Before ACTIV

Michael worked with two different agencies before he chose to work with our team. We won’t go into specific revenue numbers, but we will talk about overall customer acquisition costs and the state of the brand.

One previous agency spent over $8,000 without getting one single verifiable purchase with their campaigns. They are a well-known agency and likely promised the world. He ended the relationship after that.

The next agency was seeing strong results up until iOS 14 happened. They were seeing around a $10-$12 CPA and then when iOS 14 hit that ballooned to around $35-$40 dollars. This was not good because of a few things:

• The AOV was around $30
• The agency relied heavily on the ‘algorithm’ to help get results instead of understanding marketing fundamentals (improved creative, testing offers, etc)

At this point, Michael was at a point that he was hoping to find a partner that could help him. But I’m sure he was a bit jaded at the time. I remember first meeting Michael and learning about his brand and I was pretty excited about working with him.

I later came to learn he had sharpened his teeth at the likes of L’Oréal among other large companies working on brands. He was very knowledgable about brand, but didn’t have a ton of experience in DTC.

The Analysis

When we first reviewed Flewd, I told Michael that his brand was called a ‘Purple Cow.’ The reason for this is the fact that Flewd was unique, special, and didn’t really fit into a specific category but truly met a need.