grace & stella: What happens at the bottom of the funnel when you finally fund the top

grace & stella is a beauty and skincare brand that grew up on marketplaces. Amazon and TikTok Shop came first and the D2C site ran largely on organic traffic. There was paid activity but its job was to capture demand that already existed: performance campaigns working warm audiences and people who were already looking.

The thing is, a retargeting pool can only grow as fast as new people discover you. Once it stops growing you end up paying more and more to reach the same people. The obvious answer is top of funnel. The obvious objection is one every CFO has put to every CMO: how will we know it’s working? Reach and video views don’t show up in last-click attribution. Judge TOF on its own ROAS and it will always look like a cost.

This was grace & stella’s first sustained investment in TOF running across the US, UK and Canada. Our job was to make it earn its keep in a way the business could actually see.

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We made three decisions:

We kept the jobs separate. Stellar ran TOF on Meta, TikTok and YouTube, optimised for reach and video views and pointed only at cold audiences. BOF stayed with the performance team. If a TOF campaign optimises for purchases, the algorithm quietly drifts towards people who were going to buy anyway. You end up with expensive retargeting dressed up as brand activity.

We tested, then concentrated. Through July and August every channel ran at minimum effective spend. That was enough to get a genuine read but not so much that we’d burn budget proving the wrong thing. Then the money moved to whatever had earned it.

We measured beyond last click. A weekly tracker lined up TOF delivery against BOF platform revenue and Shopify sales, market by market. This wasn’t attribution. It was a simpler and more honest question: when the top of the funnel moves, does the bottom follow and how long does it take?

Along the way the creative work taught us three things worth sharing. Creator content hooked people far harder than polished brand content: TikTok Spark ads hit up to a 49.7% two-second view rate against 28.1% for the best brand cut. The core audience was older than you might assume with women’s thumbstop rate on Meta rising with every age band from 28.1% among 18 to 24s to 57.8% among the over-65s. One of our concepts scaled on both Meta and TikTok but everything else had to be built native to its platform.

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D2C sales grew 122% year on year in Q3. For context the site was already growing at roughly 37% through the first half. In Q3 that growth accelerated sharply and each month beat the last: July was up 88%, August 126% and September 148%.

TOF and BOF scaled together. Q3 BOF platform revenue grew 135% year on year with purchases up 88%. Average weekly BOF revenue over the last five weeks of the quarter was 80% higher than in the April to June period before TOF scaled.

The most interesting finding was the timing. BOF revenue tracked TOF delivery with a lag of about four weeks, at an overall correlation of +0.42. That relationship was positive in every market and strongest in Canada.

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