This science-backed skincare brand stopped burning cash on directionless marketing and unlocked profitable scale through structured creative strategy — and a retention engine built from scratch.
Niche
Skincare
40% YoY Topline Revenue Growth
400% Growth in Email Revenue (BAU)
35% Increase in New Customer Acquisition
Niche
Skincare
The Background
Malezia wasn’t built in a boardroom. It was built in a blog led by anonymous founder “f.c.”.
Simple Skincare Science, a chronicle of 11 years battling severe skin issues and a 50-page deep-dive on Malassezia — a fungus most skincare brands had never heard of. The post went viral. 20,000+ subscribers before a single product existed. When COVID shut down his contract manufacturer, he rented a 750 sq ft clean room from a pharma company and made it himself.
The audience was there. The trust was there. The product was real.
Then came their first agency. Eighteen months later: zero follower growth, an ad account bleeding cash and no clarity on what was working. Retention was worse — a handful of flows, BFCM-only campaigns, Klaviyo attributing just 7–10% of revenue. Tens of thousands of loyal customers, completely underserved.
Meanwhile f.c. was juggling $40K in FDA fees, tariff complications, and freight issues. He needed marketing to work. Not another agency to babysit.
"There was so much confusion on my end. Our follower count didn't grow. I honestly felt like we just spent a ton of money on ads for very little outcome."
Hear from the founder himself
The Challenge
The issues weren’t just marketing problems. They were compounding, and they were draining both cash and confidence at the same time. Here were the top gaps keeping them from growing:
- No acquisition engine.
There was no structured, profitable system to bring in new customers at scale. Without one, the cash-flow demands of growing operations would eventually catch up with the business before growth did.
- Creative testing with no signal.
Winning ads that were getting turned off for no good reason. Promising new tests that never scaled due to lack of clarity around business numbers. Zero clarity on what actually drove acquisition versus what just burned budget. Tens of thousands of dollars thrown at Meta with a flawed system of metrics.
- Retention left on the table.
The email list was built on years of genuine community trust. Tens of thousands of people who already believed in the brand, already following the f.c. protocols, and almost none of them were being emailed regularly. Klaviyo attribution was stuck at 7–10% of total store revenue.
- A founder stuck in the weeds.
They were running manufacturing, operations, customer service, and trying to manage a marketing agency at the same time. None of it was sustainable. And with chargebacks, fraudulent gift card orders, and damaged pallets piling up, something had to change.
If nothing shifted, a brand with a genuinely exceptional product and a loyal, educated audience would keep running in place.
CHECK OUT OUR CREATIVE:
The Strategy
THE STRATEGIES USED TO GET MOMENTUM AGAIN
One goal: make the founder’s life easier and make every dollar work harder. Structure, not complexity.
CHECK OUT OUR CREATIVE:
- Paid Social & Creative — Finding the Real Engine
We started with a full strategic review to understand what was actually driving acquisition vs. what was just spending.
Buried in the archives was a different kind of strategy: raw, unscripted moments of hyping up a team member’s clear skin. No product. No CTA. Just a real human moment.
We coined these “halo” videos. Because when we ran them it created a huge missing piece. It PROVED trust and believability. In a market this skeptical and educated, trust is what converts.
We rebuilt the creative strategy around it:
- Homework-driven workflow: shot lists, briefs, centralized drives. f.c. knew exactly what to film and why because we gave it to him.
- Balanced technical content (petri dish shots, product demos) with raw founder moments.
- Deliberate big-swing tests
- Monthly forecasts and targets measuring true holistic impact on a MER as we scaled.
CHECK OUT OUR CREATIVE:
- Retention — Built From the Ground Up
Almost a blank canvas. We rebuilt it completely.
Sending cadence went from sending a few times a year to three sends a week with education, product, and social proof. No discounts. No pressure. Just consistent communication with an audience already primed to buy.
Email revenue jumped from 7–10% to 30–40% of total store revenue inside the first month.
Flows rebuilt from scratch: Welcome, Abandoned Checkout, Abandoned Cart, Post Purchase, Winback, Site Abandonment, Replenishment.
SMS launched in parallel and SMS flow revenue grew 931.8% in three months. Segmented mobile/desktop popups replaced a single combined form and resulted in mobile submissions jumping 1,164.6%.
CHECK OUT OUR CREATIVE:
The Results
- Top-Line Performance
YoY Topline Revenue Growth
+40% YoY
Total Store Revenue
+36.7% YoY
Total Email Revenue (Klaviyo)
+412.4% YoY
Klaviyo % of Store Revenue
34.58% vs 9.2% prev. year
New Customer Acquisition
+35% increase
- Email Performance
Total Email Revenue
+402.1% YoY
Campaign Email Revenue
+34.7% Up
Flow Email Revenue
+4.3% Up
Campaign Open Rate
+17.1% PoP @ 56.63% avg
- List & Form Growth
Total Popup Form Submits
+198.89%
Mobile Popup Submit Rate
+64.6%
SMS Net New Subscribers
+391.5%
Final Takeaway
Malezia came to Right Hook with a great product, a loyal audience, and a founder who had built something genuinely valuable, but no marketing infrastructure capable of capturing what was already in front of him.
What changed wasn’t the brand. It was the marketing operation.
Structured creative workflows removed the guesswork. Budget analysis surfaced what was actually driving new customers. A retention engine built from nothing turned an untapped email list into over 6-figures in revenue in a single period. And a willingness to test fast, and be honest about what the data said, kept the whole machine improving.
"I really do just trust you guys. I know you have our best interests in mind. That's all we need to keep executing."
The lesson for any founder-led brand in a high-trust, high-education market: your customer acquisition doesn’t need to shout about your product. It needs to make people feel something. Raw human emotion, a genuine moment, a founder who actually cares, brings people into your world. Your backend does the rest.
For Malezia, scale was always possible. It just needed that marketing operation.
THE STRATEGISTS
Sean Benson
Sean is our Super Cool Senior Strategist. With over a decade and a half in eCom, he lives and breathes every aspect of strategy from creative to media buying to LTV analysis and everything in between. Show me those numbers!
Lily Bloomfield
Lily is originally from Queenstown, New Zealand and have five years experience in the tech and retail industry. She’s passionate about deeply understanding the consumer and their needs, and turning data points into insights and amazing campaign strategy!
Are you a founder-led brand trapped in the operational weeds?
BOOK A CALL WITH RIGHT HOOK DIGITAL
