Gardeners Dream
Scaling an e-commerce brand through creative-led performance ads
In under 4 months:
£1m+ Revenue
5.85x ROAS
22K+ sales
£45 AOV
The Brief.
Gardeners Dream and partner brand, Prickle Plants, are thriving e-commerce brands with a huge catalogue, deep product expertise and buckets of personality. What they didn’t have was a paid social system built for serious scale.
They had tried Meta ads before, the usual mix of generic static creative, broad interest targeting and short bursts of activity, but the results flatlined. Performance wasn’t consistent, acquisition costs were rising, and creative kept burning out long before the testing cycle was complete.
They didn’t want vanity metrics. They wanted a partner who could turn social into a repeatable revenue engine.
That’s where Shaka Social stepped in.
Our Approach:
We built a full creative + performance ecosystem designed for momentum.
Instead of one hero ad, we built:
A content funnel with purpose
Creative that nurtures curiosity at the top, proves value in the middle and converts decisively at the bottom.
Short-form video and thumb-stopping visuals
Social-native content that actually earns the scroll: product stories, fast-paced demonstrations, seasonal storytelling, practical benefits, hooks that speak to real customer needs.
A testing framework that learns fast
Every creative asset had a role. Every data point informed the next iteration.
Not volume for volume’s sake, but volume for insight.
Always-on optimisation
Scaling what works quickly. Killing what doesn’t even quicker.
The results:
In just 6 months, paid social became Gardeners Dream’s most scalable acquisition channel:
£1M+ revenue generated
ROAS lifted.
CPAs stabilised.
Scaling became repeatable.
The brand is now consistently profitable while growing month-on-month.
The holy grail of DTC e-commerce performance.
Why it worked
Gardeners Dream didn’t scale because we spent more.
It scaled because we changed what the algorithm was learning from.
Most ad accounts fail when they rely on static audiences, tired creative and optimisation that only looks at CPA. We built something different: a system where creative was the primary optimisation signal.
Every week, we fed Meta a constant stream of new, high-signal creative:
new hooks, new product stories, new formats, new emotional angles. That allowed the algorithm to continuously find new pockets of intent instead of fighting over the same exhausted audiences.
At the same time, we structured campaigns around a full-funnel content journey. Prospecting creative was built to earn attention and build belief. Mid-funnel ads were designed to demonstrate value and social proof. Bottom-funnel assets focused on clarity, urgency and conversion. Each layer did a different job, but all of it was tested, measured and refined together.
Because we owned both the creative production and the paid media strategy, nothing lived in silos. Performance data informed what we shot next. Winning ads became new creative directions. Under-performers were killed quickly and replaced. The system kept learning, and the account kept scaling.
That’s why growth stayed stable even as spend increased.
We weren’t guessing. We were compounding insight.
“No agency comes close to them for how they blend creative and performance, two areas that can quite often be disconnected, they piece together perfectly.”
Cameron McLean | Gardeners Dream
What’s next?
Gardeners Dream now has something most e-commerce brands don’t:
a paid social engine that can scale without breaking.
We’re still building new angles, new product stories and new audience segments, but we’re doing it from a position of confidence, not volatility. The brand can invest more aggressively, launch more products, and push harder in peak seasons because the foundation is already there.
This is what sustainable performance looks like:
not one winning ad, but a system that keeps producing them.
Ready to build a growth engine like this?
If this sounds like the kind of growth you want, let’s explore it together.
We’ll look at your brand, your numbers, and what it would take to build something sustainable.