Mei L'ange: A 4.7x ROAS Without a New Photo Shoot, and a Target Set by Margins

By Kevin Veitia

Client

Mei L'ange, a women's swimwear brand selling online and through US department stores

Channels

Facebook and Instagram (Meta Ads)

Timeframe

A test in December 2018, then early 2019

Budget

From $1,000 a month to high five figures a month

Goal

Online sales at a target ROAS

The challenge

Mei L'ange designs premium women's swimwear. Its suits sold in upscale US department stores, and it wanted its own website to sell more of them directly. The suits sat at the upper end on price, were designed for women over 25, and sold all year, because winter is when people book holidays somewhere warm. The founder had noticed winter orders clustering in Florida, California and Texas.

Two things made it hard. Facebook didn't yet know who the brand's online customers were. And swimwear lives or dies on its imagery, which usually means photo shoots: models, locations, retouching, and a fresh round for every new idea you want to test.

What we did

Found the audience first

This was before iOS 14.5, when the audience was the biggest lever in a Facebook account. So we started the way the SUREFIRE method starts: one control ad, run unchanged across competing audiences, so any difference in results came from who saw it. The first round, in December 2018, tested four:

• Frequent travelers interested in warm destinations like the Caribbean, Latin America and Southeast Asia
• Women living in Florida and Southern California
• People interested in swimwear and swimming
• Shoppers of the department stores that already carried the line

The last one did double duty, as the founder pointed out. Someone who shops at a luxury department store can probably afford a premium swimsuit, so the audience filtered for budget as well as taste.

Each pair of audiences got $250 for the week, and the rules were set before launch: no verdict before 3,000 impressions, and any ad set that spent $100 without a sale was switched off. It was a $1,000-a-month test, built to give us a baseline and a pixel that knew who buys.

Put the product front and center

With the audience settled, testing moved to the creative: products on their own, products with a person, product mockups, carousels against single images, GIFs and video. What won was the simplest idea: the swimsuit up front, in the center, the first thing anyone saw. Most competitors sold a mood, models on beaches. We sold the suit.

Made creative without photo shoots

This is the part we'd reuse on any product brand. Instead of booking a shoot for every test, we took the brand's flat product shots, placed them onto model templates, and changed the backgrounds in Photoshop: a pool, a beach, a plain studio wall. One suit could become a dozen ads in an afternoon, each changing a single thing.

That's variabilized advertising: change one element at a time, so every result tells you exactly what moved the number. It's the same approach we used across Yizzam's catalog, and it meant testing was limited by ideas, not by the budget for shoots.

Results

• A 4.7x ROAS on Facebook and Instagram, at a high five-figure monthly budget in 2019
• A relevance score of 8 out of 10. Facebook rated every ad from 1 to 10 on how its audience responded until it retired the score in 2019, and an 8 meant people engaged with the ads rather than hiding them
• From a $1,000-a-month test to a high five-figure monthly budget within a few months

Where the target came from

For most direct-to-consumer brands, a 4.7x ROAS on cold traffic at that budget is a strong result. Mei L'ange was working toward a higher target, around 6 to 7x, and after a couple of months we parted ways.

That gap is worth understanding, because ads can only close part of it. Better creative lowers what each sale costs. It can't change how much of each sale a business keeps, which depends on what the product costs to make, ship and return, and what it sells for.

A ROAS target has to come from the unit economics: what a customer brings in over time (their lifetime value), what each order costs you, and what you can afford to pay to win one. Work that out before you set anyone a target. If the number that comes out is unusually high, look at margins alongside the ads. It's why our consulting work often starts with unit economics rather than ads.

What you can take from this

• Find the audience before you test creative, when the platform still lets the audience lead. Before iOS 14.5, it did.
• Set kill rules before launch. $100 without a sale, and the ad set goes.
• You don't need a photo shoot for every test. Mockups let you change one thing at a time for almost nothing.
• Put the product first. People can't want what they can't see.
• A ROAS target comes from your margins. When it's unusually high, look at margins as well as the ads.

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