PupSocks: 70% YoY Growth to Prove, You Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

Being both a visually oriented product and a brand born via paid social, PupSocks came out of the gate with a competitive channel advantage.

Founded by Zach Zelner in 2017, he quickly scaled the business via ecommerce to $8M in revenue within the first 30 days. 

With an impressive start, the challenge was to follow up that initial feat by unlocking more growth and scale.

The Challenge

Both a gifting product and an impulse buy, PupSocks was a one-two punch for a strong conversion rate, averaging a whopping 9%. 

With the goal of amping up holiday sales, PupSocks teamed up with Common Thread Collective (CTC), driving new visitors through paid media as a key component of its strategy.

In 2017, PupSocks ran conversion campaigns on Facebook during the holiday season targeted to animal lovers, which generated more than 90% of the company’s annual revenue and yielded a 3.7x return on ad spend.

“The 2017 holiday campaign with CTC was an exciting journey from start to finish,” said Zelner. “Facebook advertising alone was responsible for over 90% of revenue generated on PupSocks and the sheer volume of impressions has garnered us public relations spots across the world.” 

But, as we all know too well, it’s not 2017 on Facebook.

With returns lower than they used to be, it was time for a new approach to amplify visitors and conversion rates for holiday 2019. 

“We had exhausted our broad audiences,” says Trent Kerth, Lead Paid Media Buyer for PupSocks. “The brand awareness was there, every potential visitor had been reached. Now it was a matter of getting them to convert.”

The Solution

To revive an exhausted audience, the lifeline came from expanding PupSocks’ creative library. 

Refreshing the account with new creative reduced ad fatigue. But it didn’t stop there — whether it was a different sock color, pet breed, or ad format — the team continually tested variations. Then, iterated on best-performing ad creative to find the winners ahead of Black Friday. 

Like the early bird that got the worm, PupSocks dominated holiday sales, since the winning creative formats were identified ahead of time.

“When you’re spending over $1M a month on Facebook, eventually people are going to get banner blindness from seeing that ad multiple times,” says Kerth.

Eventually people are going to get banner blindness …

With extensive creative variation, PupSocks was able to combat that fatigue — granting more scale and reaching other audiences that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise with just one ad.

The Results

The amount of ad creative made was more than any other year and, as a result, PupSocks had their biggest revenue year in the history of the brand.