Building a Startup's Growth Engine from Scratch

The Situation

BAKEUP Beauty was a brand-new makeup brand, created by a celebrity makeup artist known for using bold color as a statement. The company was gearing up for its first major product launch, but its website was a splash page with some PR about the brand. It was not set up for customers to easily shop. The brand had a small email list and social following but no clear strategy in place to grow those numbers. Finally, they didn't have any automation, such as an email to customers who abandon their cart, set up to improve site conversion.

I had worked with BAKEUP's CEO at Origami Owl, and she hired me to build their ecommerce engine from the ground up.

Business Risks I Uncovered

A brand launch only pays off if you can send enough interested buyers to your ecommerce store and the website can turn those visitors into customers. Revenue growth becomes more difficult if lifecycle channels like email and organic social can't bring new customers back to the site to buy again. Without that system in place, BAKEUP faced three risks:

• Wasted launch spend. Every dollar spent on PR and advertising would send traffic to a site that couldn't convert it.
• A slower return on inventory investment. The company had already paid to produce its first products. A weak site would stretch out how long it took to earn that money back.
• Paying for every repeat sale. With only a small email list and social following, BAKEUP would have to keep buying ads to bring customers back.

Solutions I Implemented

As a young startup, BAKEUP had a small team and limited budget, so we couldn't do everything at once. I mapped the full customer journey, from first hearing about the brand to buying again, and rated every step by the effort needed to fix it and the revenue impact it would have. Three areas rose to the top:

• Turning a splash page into a store. I led a complete redesign: a new site structure with category and product pages, a shoppable homepage, and updated navigation, colors and content. I also tested Shopify apps and landing page content to raise both the conversion rate and the average order size.
• Capturing and converting visitors. I set up automated email sequences in Klaviyo to welcome new visitors and turn them into buyers. To grow the email list, I built a campaign that sent beauty fans from TikTok and Instagram to a quiz on our site, with an email sign-up at the result.
• Finding ads that worked, fast. I brought on a digital agency and hired a social content strategist, then set up a weekly testing routine. We published new content on organic social first, turned each week's top performer into an ad, and fed what we learned about products, video length and style back to the team before the next shoot.