A beauty DTC brand with strong organic engagement needed a way to scale without just throwing money at acquisition. The answer was in their own customers' phones.
Saltyface brings together cosmetics, tanning, and skincare — built on safe, eco-friendly ingredients. Their products generated genuine, organic enthusiasm from customers who loved sharing their results online. The brand had something many agencies can't manufacture: authentic social proof, already happening at scale.
The challenge was figuring out how to turn that organic energy into a paid media machine without sacrificing margins.
The challengeSaltyface was significantly underspending on advertising — missing a major opportunity to leverage their strong first-order contribution margin. But they were hesitant about non-branded creative, wary of stepping away from the polished, on-brand content they controlled.
The real opportunity was in their customers' content. Hundreds of people were already organically sharing their Saltyface experiences — real, unfiltered, highly converting. The question was how to harness it.
The strategyWe ran a social listening campaign to aggregate all organic UGC content and initiated direct conversations with 375 creators. We secured content rights from 113 of them, resulting in 332 pieces of campaign-ready content — video and photo assets ready to run in paid media from day one.
We built a detailed 12-month financial forecast with Saltyface's CEO that mapped ad spend against seasonality, contribution margin targets, and OPEX. The goal was never to reduce CAC in isolation — it was to ensure growth was financially sustainable across the whole business, not just at the channel level.
We ran Automated Shopping Campaigns (ASC) with cost caps structured per SKU, ensuring every campaign operated within profitable margins. UGC creative fuelled high delivery rates at low cost caps. Budget scaled intelligently — up during peak seasons, pulled back when efficiency dipped.
I was very impressed with the forecasting. The spreadsheets probably had 15 pages of our brand's micro and macro economics — super helpful in helping us understand overall strategy in our ad spend that would lead us to our goals.
Saltyface's story isn't just about revenue numbers — it's about building a growth model that can sustain itself. By aligning ad spend with contribution margin and OPEX targets, the brand achieved growth that was financially sound, not just impressive on a dashboard.
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