Building Trust While Building A Brand: Turning Previous Failure Into A 27% Increase In Sales

How Pennock Convinced Facile Skin To Trust An Agency With Building Their Pre-Sephora Brand Launch

Situation.

Burned by the last agency: After being ghosted and left with underperforming traffic campaigns, the CEO felt frustrated and skeptical about agency partnerships.

Unclear Budget Allocation

With Sephora becoming 70% of revenue, they needed clear guidance on how to split spend between DTC and retail, especially with limited tracking on Sephora.com.

No Creative Direction

Facile wanted to test more into paid creative but wasn’t seeing results—and without an in-house creative team, they felt stuck and under-resourced.

Distrust Of Agencies

Given past experiences, they weren’t sure a new agency could actually deliver a smart, full-funnel strategy—especially without tying top-of-funnel spend directly to ROAS.

 

With Sephora doors opening soon, the team needed awareness and lead gen campaigns live before launch so shoppers weren’t discovering the brand for the first time in-store.

Our Approach.

In order to revitalize Face Reality’s trust in working with advertising agencies we wanted to create a strategy that not only enhanced their online efforts with the impending Sephora roll out, but also kept them educated and informed every step of the way.

  1. Creative Briefs & Testing Strategy: Deliver monthly creative briefs to guide content creation across hero products and new launches, paired with multivariate testing to find top-performing ad angles and formats.

  2. Drive Traffic to Sephora: Run high-efficiency traffic campaigns to Facile’s Sephora PDP and brand pages to build awareness, drive footfall, and support sales in the absence of pixel tracking.

  3. Model ROI Without Tracking: Since Sephora doesn't allow direct attribution, we use traffic volume, conversion rate benchmarks, and revenue projections to estimate return and inform budget scaling decisions.

Objectives.

Objective 1: Rebuild trust through strategy and transparency | Deliver a smart, full-funnel paid media strategy with clear performance reporting to rebuild confidence after a poor agency experience.

Objective 2: Support a successful Sephora rollout | Drive pre-launch lead gen, brand awareness, and retail traffic to ensure Facile shows up strong in Sephora doors—both online and in key markets.

Objective 3: Fill the creative and strategic gaps | Provide ongoing creative direction, testing insights, and media recommendations to help the brand scale without a full in-house team.

Services Provided.

  • Meta Ad Management & Strategy

  • Tiktok Ad Management & Strategy

  • StackAdapt Ad Management & Strategy

  • Reporting and tracking enhancement

  • Creative Strategy

Results & Impact.

The results spoke for themselves:

  • Improved Efficiency Across Platforms: Despite fluctuating spend levels, we consistently drove down CACs (e.g., 36% decrease on Google in May)

  • Increased purchases MoM (e.g., +27% on Google in May)

  • Boosted ROAS through strategic shifts like audience pruning, keyword pausing, and creative optimizations. Learnings from March’s underperforming product campaigns led to April and May budget reallocations into high-performing SKUs (e.g., Brighten, Dew You), driving higher ROAS in both Meta and Google PMax campaigns and informing further creative testing.

  • Across March–May, UGC ads (like the Azalia video) delivered the highest click volume and lowest CPCs in Meta traffic campaigns for Sephora—highlighting a clear creative direction for efficient top-of-funnel performance.

↑51%

Increase in ROAS April To June

↓36%

Decrease in Google CAC

↑27%

MOM Increase In Purchases