The brief
When Saltbush Co came to us they were spending $40K/month on Meta with a 1.2× ROAS. Not catastrophically bad, but not a business anyone could scale. Their creative was beautiful - the problem was it was brand photography running as direct response. The two jobs needed to be separated.
How we structure Meta spend for DTC fashion
We run three campaign types: a prospecting campaign targeting cold audiences by interest and lookalike, a retargeting campaign for engaged non-purchasers (14-day window), and a retention campaign for past customers. Each has different creative briefs, different success metrics, and different budget allocation rules. Cold audiences get the majority of budget because that's where the growth is - but retention pays for itself many times over on LTV.
The creative testing framework
We test three variables per month: hook (first 3 seconds), format (static vs video vs carousel), and offer framing (price vs social proof vs urgency). We never test more than one variable at a time in a single ad set. Each test runs for a minimum of 7 days with a $50/day budget before we call it. The 'winning' creative from each month's test gets moved into the core campaign. We killed 63% of the formats we tested - that's not failure, that's data.
What we got wrong
Our biggest early mistake was putting sustainability messaging in prospecting creative. It resonated with existing customers but performed poorly cold. Prospecting creative for Saltbush needed to lead with product and lifestyle - the brand story came in retargeting, once someone already knew the product. We also underweighted Advantage+ Shopping initially. Once we rebuilt the campaign structure around it, our prospecting ROAS improved 0.6× in six weeks.
The three formats that drove 80% of revenue
Static images outperformed video in retargeting by a significant margin - probably because the audience already knew the product and just needed a clean reminder. In prospecting, short-form UGC (15–30 second) beat our polished brand video by 2×. And carousels, which we almost didn't include in the test matrix, drove the highest average order values when product diversity was shown. Those three formats now make up the core of every Saltbush campaign we run.