The brand had a genuinely good product and a small, loyal customer base — but the store itself was working against them. At roughly £10K a year in revenue, growth had effectively stalled.
The Shopify theme was slow, generic and unconverting: a templated layout that didn’t reflect the brand, a checkout path with unnecessary friction, and no clear structure guiding a first-time visitor toward a purchase.
What little paid traffic existed was landing on pages that weren’t built to convert it — so every pound of ad spend was doing less work than it should have.