How we helped grow Tony Bianco's US business, and built in-house capability.

Tony Bianco was already building real momentum in the US. We came in to accelerate it: shifting spend toward new-customer acquisition, lifting creative volume and tightening the account structure, while building the in-house team's capability to keep scaling.

+54%

US new-customer revenue

+59%

Ad spend at flat aMER

−86%

Non-incremental brand spend

Tony Bianco had a strong brand and genuine room to grow in the US. The opportunity was to point more of the budget at new customers rather than demand the brand already had, give the account more creative to scale into, and build the team's capability to run it. That is what we did.

The opportunity.

Tony Bianco has sold designer footwear for over 50 years, with a strong position across Australia and New Zealand and growing traction in the United States. Australia is a mature, finite market, so the biggest room to grow sat in scaling the US.

The brand was already growing there. The opportunity was in the margins. A large share of spend was working demand the brand already had rather than bringing in new customers: nearly half the Meta budget, 49.5%, sat against existing customers, a meaningful chunk of Google spend was buying branded search the brand would have captured anyway, and creative volume was below what an account needs to keep scaling, because under modern Meta the creative is doing the targeting.

What we changed.

We moved the money to where it created customers, and we proved which spend was incremental before we touched it.

Where the money goes. We cut existing-customer spend on Meta from 49.5% to 6.7%, rebuilt audience definitions and exclusions, and moved decisioning to a 7-day-click setting so the account optimised to acquisition, not credited revenue.
Google without the brand tax. We shifted heavily into Shopping, which does not spend on brand, so we could trust the conversions were ones we would not have won for free.
A real testing engine. We built a Meta testing campaign segmented by product type at the ad-set level and scaled horizontally through the winners. Paired with a 54% increase in creative volume, the account had enough new concepts to keep finding new customers.
Acquisition by product, not by average. We analysed new-customer LTV by product type across repeat rate, LTV lift and number of new customers acquired, then set different CAC targets by product. Not every product earns the same CAC ceiling, and treating them as if they do leaves growth on the table.

Then the measurement. Before we cut branded spend, we tested whether it was real. We ran a geo holdout across four states with comparable revenue profiles, two wholesale-led and two online-led, holding one of each as a control and cutting branded spend 50% in the other two, with the freed budget redistributed so brand was the only variable under test. After four to six weeks the test and control states barely diverged. Branded spend was producing little to no incremental lift, so we cut it: down 86% versus the prior period and 63% year on year. That budget went to acquisition.

Building the team to run it.

The Tony Bianco relationship began with a consulting engagement to ensure spend across platforms was incremental. From there, every decision came with the why and every problem we solved came with the how, across weekly calls, Slack and Loom walkthroughs. The team already knew their account. What they needed was the operating model: how to read incrementality, how to structure for acquisition, how to set CAC targets by product, and how to keep creative volume high enough to scale into.

They took management back in-house and kept running the same system. That was always the goal. An agency that builds dependency is selling a subscription. The job is to leave the client better, not hooked.

The outcome.

In the US, across the engagement:

+54%

New-customer revenue

Year on year across the engagement period.

+54.9%

Total revenue

Year on year across the engagement period.

+59%

Ad spend at flat efficiency

Acquisition MER held essentially flat, 7.64 to 7.42, as spend scaled. Scaling that hard while holding efficiency is the whole game.

+16%

New-customer CAC

A small, deliberate rise to unlock 59% more profitable spend and many more new customers, kept inside the product-level targets.

What matters is that the efficiency held as spend scaled, and that the team can now reproduce it.

They helped us scale investment in the US without sacrificing efficiency. By redirecting spend towards new-customer acquisition, improving our creative-testing process and setting clearer targets by product, we were able to grow with much greater confidence. They also made sure the knowledge stayed within our business.

Adam Bianco · Tony Bianco

US figures are measured across the engagement period against the prior-year comparison. New-customer revenue and acquisition MER are defined on new customers.

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