Start Safety UK
How an account rebuild grew Start Safety revenue by over 20%, with the same media spend
- +22% YTD purchases
- +20% Revenue growth
- +19% Growth in ROAS
Strategy overview
Start Safety UK supply safety equipment across the UK and Europe. The business has expanded quickly, and the product range has expanded with it. The paid media account had not kept up.
Years of growth had left the inventory large and disorganised. That disorganisation showed up directly in paid performance. Spend was going to the wrong products, efficiency was decreasing, and every attempt to scale ran into the same problems.
Herd were brought in to fix that. The goal was a paid media account that stayed efficient as the catalogue grew, and revenue growth that came from working the budget harder, not from simply adding to it.
Visit websiteThe brief
Start Safety needed paid media that could keep pace with a catalogue that never stops growing. Spend had to follow performance, efficiency had to improve, and revenue had to grow with the media budget held broadly flat. This was a structural problem, so the work centred on rebuilding the account, rather than just increasing investment.
Key objectives
- Make paid media efficient and scaleable across a fast growing, large SKU range
- Grow revenue with media spend remaining flat
- Stop budget being wasted on weak products that don't sell profitably
Project highlights
We started with our strategic framework, not the campaigns. That meant getting under the hood of the category, the account performance and the setup, and agreeing where paid media could move the numbers. The structural problems surfaced during this stage, which is why the work became a rebuild.
The old account gave every product category its own campaign. As the range grew, this splintered the budget across too many campaigns and pushed money towards low performing SKUs. Scale was capped and efficiency suffered. The bids were fine. The structure was the problem.
We rebuilt the account around how products perform. Every SKU sits in a performance bucket, from top performers and best sellers down to low priority and low performers, and budget is weighted towards the ones earning it. Strong products get room to scale, weak ones are held back, and the whole account pulls towards incremental growth.
New SKUs arrive constantly, so each one starts in a dedicated launch campaign and is measured against clear KPIs. A product only moves into the performance buckets once it has proven it belongs there. Nothing gets funded on assumption.
Performance buckets are not fixed. Every three months we reassess each product on its returns and move it to where it now belongs. Budget tracks live performance as the catalogue changes and the market shifts, and the structure never becomes out of date.
With budget following performance, we took on a far larger inventory and kept media spend flat. Media spend only increased as profit and revenue did.
The results in detail
The rebuild grew the business and sharpened its efficiency at the same time, across a larger inventory and on flat media spend. All figures are from GA4, compared year to date from January to April, 25/26.
- Revenue grew by over 20% year to date, year on year, as budget prioritised top performing products
- Purchases rose by 22%, with new eCommerce features improving the rate at which customers converted
- ROAS grew by 19% as a leading indicator within the media accounts, to how the new structure was performing
- Activity was expanded across a broader product range, as new SKUs landed. Media spend remained at similar levels
Why this worked
A paid media team that truly understands a brands' market, competition, and product set before making account improvements.
Most agencies would have asked for more budget. Start Safety's problem was never the size of the spend, it was where the spend was going. Grouping products by performance and reviewing them every three months put the budget behind what sells and kept it there as the catalogue grew. Revenue climbed, efficiency improved, and the media investment barely moved.
