8+ years growing brands on KPIs, now with AI
AI-Powered Performance Marketing for DTC Makeup Brands
We help indie and growth-stage makeup brands turn rising CAC and compressing ROAS into profitable, scalable customer acquisition, on Meta, TikTok, and beyond.
Google Ads · Meta · TikTok Partners · 8+ Years Growing Ecommerce Brands
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The Challenge
Running a DTC Makeup Brand in 2025 Is a Different Problem Than It Was Three Years Ago
You're not just competing with other indie brands anymore. You're competing with Sephora's private label, Amazon surfacing dupes below your price point, and TikTok Shop white-label sellers who will undercut you on cost without blinking. The customer has more choices than ever, and they're more discerning than ever.
Meanwhile, the economics have gotten harder. CPMs on Meta are up. Your platform-reported ROAS looks acceptable until you realize someone saw your Instagram ad on Monday, Googled you on Tuesday, got a retargeting ad on Wednesday, and bought direct on Thursday, and Meta claimed full credit for all of it. Your real blended ROAS is probably lower than your dashboard says.
And the unit economics of beauty are unforgiving at scale. The average beauty brand has an 84% first-order payback rate but only a 35% repurchase rate. That gap (between a customer who bought once and a customer who actually comes back) is where most makeup brands quietly bleed margin. A 1.4x LTV:CAC ratio, which is the beauty ecommerce average, is not a business. It's a treadmill.
You're probably wearing CMO, CFO, and creative director hats at the same time. You're not in research mode. You're in triage mode. And the last thing you need is an agency that doesn't understand the difference between a hero SKU and a seasonal bundle, or why your Klaviyo flows matter as much as your Meta spend.
The Opportunity
The Brands That Get This Right Are Building Something That Compounds
Beauty is still one of the highest-intent, highest-repeat ecommerce categories in existence. A customer who buys your hero SKU and repurchases twice in the first 90 days is worth dramatically more than your AOV suggests. Top beauty brands earn an extra $40 per customer by Month 12 just by optimizing that early-cohort window.
TikTok is the most underpenetrated high-ROAS channel most indie makeup brands are still running wrong. In 2024, beauty products on TikTok Shop sold at an average rate of one per second, peaking at five per second during November. Beauty and personal care brands consistently hit 3.5x ROAS on TikTok because the platform's native format — short-form video, UGC-style demos, shoppable content — is structurally built for the way people discover and buy makeup. The brands winning there aren't running polished studio ads. They're running content that looks like a real person doing their morning routine.
Meta retargeting, when attribution is set up correctly and creative is tested at volume, still delivers 3.5x+ ROAS for beauty brands with a disciplined approach. The problem isn't the channel. It's the creative velocity and the measurement.
And email is almost certainly your most underworked asset. Abandoned cart, post-purchase upsell, replenishment reminders, birthday flows: these are not nice-to-haves. For a brand with a 107-day average time between orders, an automated Klaviyo sequence that pulls a customer back at day 90 is the difference between a 1.4x and a 3x LTV:CAC ratio.
The opportunity is real. The brands capturing it are the ones who treat creative as a performance variable, measure what actually drives repurchase, and run their channels as a coordinated system, not as separate experiments.
What Most Get Wrong
What Most Makeup Brands (and Their Agencies) Get Wrong
Optimizing for first-order ROAS instead of repurchase rate
A 3x ROAS on a first order looks great until you realize 65% of those customers never buy again. Brands that optimize solely for acquisition ROAS without tracking 90-day LTV cohorts are building a leaky bucket, and most agencies never show you the cohort data.
Running one or two creative concepts until they die
Meta and TikTok reward creative freshness. A brand testing one ad concept per month against a competitor testing twelve is losing the auction before the campaign even launches. Creative fatigue on beauty ads hits fast. Consumers scroll past the same hook in days, not weeks.
Trusting platform-reported ROAS as the source of truth
Multi-touch attribution in beauty is broken by design. A customer who discovers you on TikTok, retargets on Instagram, and converts via direct traffic will show up as three separate 'wins' across three platforms. Without a blended MER view and proper attribution tooling, you're making budget decisions on fiction.
Treating TikTok like a scaled-down version of Meta
Repurposing Meta static ads or polished video for TikTok is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in beauty marketing. TikTok's algorithm rewards native-feeling UGC. A founder doing a foundation routine with imperfect lighting outperforms a studio shoot almost every time. Running the wrong creative format on TikTok doesn't just underperform; it actively suppresses your account's reach.
Neglecting Klaviyo flows until after the launch push
Most indie beauty brands set up a basic abandoned cart flow and call it done. The real LTV leverage is in the post-purchase sequence: the product education email at day 3, the complementary SKU offer at day 14, the replenishment nudge at day 90. Brands that build these flows before scaling paid acquisition compound every dollar they spend on ads.
Why Now
Why the Next 12 Months Are a Defining Window for Indie Makeup Brands
The makeup market is in a consolidation moment. Investment firms are actively acquiring indie beauty brands that demonstrate repeatable, profitable growth. The brands being acquired are not the ones with the most Instagram followers. They're the ones with clean unit economics, rising repurchase rates, and a paid channel strategy that holds ROAS at scale.
At the same time, most of your competitors are still running the same Meta playbook they used in 2021, with static creative, flat budgets, and no cohort-level measurement. They're watching ROAS compress and assuming it's a market problem. It's not. It's a strategy problem.
AI has changed what a disciplined operator can do with creative and measurement. Testing twelve creative angles per week instead of two is now operationally achievable without a massive production budget. Catching attribution errors that are inflating your numbers (and fixing them before you scale spend on a broken signal) is now something a well-instrumented team can do in days, not months.
Q4 is the year-maker for beauty. Meta ROAS during Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2024 increased 17%, with conversion rates surging 32%. But CPMs also spike 30–50% above annual average, which means the brands that pre-fund inventory, build creator content, and have their campaigns dialed in by September win the quarter, and the brands that start optimizing in October are paying premium CPMs for mediocre results.
The window to build that infrastructure — the creative engine, the attribution clarity, the Klaviyo retention architecture — is now, before the Q4 push, not during it.
The Mechanism
Where AI Actually Creates Edge for a Makeup Brand
Real productivity, not AI theater. Here's where it actually moves a number for makeup brands.
Creative
What AI does: AI-assisted creative strategy and production workflows that generate and test significantly more ad concepts per week — UGC-style hooks, founder POV angles, before/after formats, product demo variations — across Meta and TikTok simultaneously.
The result: A brand testing ten creative concepts per week finds its winning hook in days rather than months, and keeps creative fresh enough to avoid the fatigue that tanks beauty ad performance.
Why it matters here: In makeup, creative IS the targeting. The right hook — a founder applying a lip liner in natural light, a 'dupe check' format, a shade-range callout — determines whether a cold audience stops scrolling. Running one concept until it dies is how beauty brands watch their CPMs climb and assume it's a market problem.
Analytics
What AI does: AI-powered attribution modeling that reconciles platform-reported ROAS against actual blended MER, catching discrepancies where Meta, TikTok, and Google are each claiming credit for the same purchase, and surfacing true new-customer CAC by channel.
The result: Budget decisions made on real numbers instead of inflated platform data, with clear visibility into which channels are actually driving first-order payback and 90-day repurchase.
Why it matters here: Beauty has one of the most complex multi-touch paths in ecommerce: TikTok discovery, Instagram retargeting, Google brand search, direct checkout. Without accurate attribution, you will scale the wrong channels and wonder why blended ROAS keeps compressing even as individual platform numbers look fine.
What AI does: AI-built Klaviyo flow architecture that maps the beauty repurchase cycle — post-purchase product education at day 3, complementary SKU recommendation at day 14, replenishment reminder at day 90, GWP offer timed to the 107-day average reorder window — plus continuous optimization of subject lines and send timing.
The result: A retention engine that pulls customers back without ad spend, improving repurchase rate from the beauty-average 35% toward the 50%+ that separates profitable brands from treadmill brands.
Why it matters here: A makeup brand with a 107-day average time between orders that has no automated re-engagement sequence is leaving the highest-margin revenue in the business on the table. Every dollar spent acquiring a customer who never repurchases is a dollar that needed a 3x+ ROAS just to break even.
Social Media
What AI does: TikTok-native content strategy built around UGC-style creative and TikTok Shop affiliate management: identifying, briefing, and scaling micro-tier creators who produce shoppable content on commission, with AI used to analyze which creator formats and hooks are driving the highest add-to-cart rates.
The result: A TikTok channel that generates consistent 3x+ ROAS through native-feeling content rather than repurposed Meta assets, with a creator roster that compounds over time as top affiliates are identified and scaled.
Why it matters here: TikTok Shop is where beauty products sold at one per second in 2024. The brands winning there are not running ads. They're running a creator operation. Getting the affiliate infrastructure right now, before your competitors build their rosters, is a durable competitive advantage.
Conversion Optimization
What AI does: AI-assisted landing page and product detail page testing focused on the specific conversion levers that move beauty buyers: shade-finder tools, before/after imagery sequencing, social proof placement (UGC reviews above the fold), bundle and GWP presentation, and mobile checkout friction reduction.
The result: Higher conversion rate on the traffic you're already paying for, which directly improves blended ROAS without increasing ad spend.
Why it matters here: A makeup brand paying $25–$40 CPCs on Meta to send traffic to a product page that converts at 1.8% instead of 3.5% is effectively paying double for every customer. CRO on beauty PDPs is one of the highest-leverage investments a growth-stage brand can make before scaling spend.
Ready to see what this looks like for your makeup brands business?
No obligation. A senior strategist will show you exactly where the wins are.
The Strategy
What a Real Makeup Brand Growth Strategy Actually Looks Like
The foundation is measurement. Before we touch a single ad, we verify that your blended MER is calculable, that you can look at total revenue divided by total ad spend and trust the number. That means auditing your pixel, your Klaviyo attribution, your Google Analytics setup, and reconciling what each platform claims against what actually hit your Shopify dashboard. Most brands we talk to are making six-figure budget decisions on numbers that are off by 30–50%.
With clean measurement in place, the channel strategy for a growth-stage makeup brand follows a specific logic. Meta is your prospecting and retargeting workhorse. But it only works at the creative velocity beauty demands. We're testing new hooks weekly, not monthly. TikTok is your fastest-growing acquisition channel if you treat it as a creator operation, not an ad platform: UGC-style content and TikTok Shop affiliate management, not repurposed Meta video. Google Shopping and brand search capture the high-intent buyers already in your funnel from social; it's not where you prospect, but it's where you close.
Email and SMS (your Klaviyo infrastructure) is built in parallel with paid, not after. The post-purchase sequence, the 90-day replenishment flow, the complementary SKU recommendation, the GWP offer timed to your average reorder window: these are the mechanisms that turn a 35% repurchase rate into a 50%+ one, and they compound every dollar you spend on acquisition.
Budget pacing is tied to the beauty calendar, not a flat monthly spend. Q4 (October through December) is the year-maker. CPMs spike 30–50%, which means creative and inventory must be ready by September. Valentine's Day and Mother's Day are bundle and limited-edition moments. January and June are efficiency months: lower CPMs, lower competition, the right time to test new creative angles and build your TikTok creator roster before the next peak.
Every decision is governed by one number: blended ROAS. Not Meta ROAS. Not TikTok ROAS. Total revenue divided by total ad spend, measured weekly, with new-customer CAC and 90-day repurchase rate as the leading indicators that tell you whether that ROAS is sustainable or a one-cohort fluke.
The one number that governs this
Governing KPI: Blended ROAS (total revenue ÷ total ad spend), tracked weekly alongside new-customer CAC and 90-day repurchase rate
How We Help
Here's Specifically What We'd Do for a Makeup Brand Like Yours
We'd start by making your numbers trustworthy: auditing attribution, reconciling platform data against Shopify, and establishing a clean blended MER baseline. From there, we build the paid, retention, and creative systems in the sequence that actually compounds. We take on a limited number of clients so every engagement gets senior attention, and our success is measured against your KPIs, not our activity.
Paid Social (Meta & TikTok)
Meta prospecting and retargeting rebuilt around weekly creative testing cadence; TikTok campaigns structured as a native-content operation rather than a repurposed ad channel, with creative formats matched to the platform's UGC-driven beauty discovery behavior.
Creative Strategy & Production
AI-assisted creative workflow that generates and tests significantly more ad angles per week — founder POV, UGC-style demos, shade-range callouts, before/after formats — so you find the hook that drives your hero SKU's lowest CAC before competitors do.
Analytics & Attribution
Full attribution audit and blended MER dashboard setup: reconciling Meta, TikTok, Google, and Klaviyo data against actual Shopify revenue so budget decisions are made on real numbers, not inflated platform claims.
Email & SMS (Klaviyo)
Post-purchase flow architecture mapped to the beauty repurchase cycle: product education at day 3, complementary SKU at day 14, replenishment nudge at day 90, GWP offer timed to your average reorder window, built before we scale paid, not after.
TikTok Shop & Creator Management
Affiliate creator identification, briefing, and performance tracking: building the roster of micro-tier creators producing shoppable content on commission, with AI analysis of which hooks and formats are driving the highest add-to-cart rates.
Conversion Optimization
Product detail page and landing page testing focused on beauty-specific conversion levers: UGC review placement, shade-finder tools, bundle and GWP presentation, and mobile checkout friction reduction, improving the conversion rate on traffic you're already paying for.
Google Ads (Shopping & Brand Search)
Shopping and brand search campaigns that capture high-intent buyers already in your funnel from social, structured to close the purchase without cannibalizing organic and without over-investing in a channel that isn't the primary prospecting driver for indie beauty.
Who's Behind This
Who we are, and what makes us different
Sagum is a performance marketing agency founded in January 2017 in St. George, Utah. We've spent 8+ years growing real brands and being judged on KPIs, not vanity metrics.
We deliberately limit how many clients we take so each one gets senior attention. We treat your numbers like our own, we never run generic playbooks, and your strategy is built for your business, because shouldn't your brand's marketing be custom to your brand?
Sagum.ai is our AI arm: the same proven operators now build AI into the work wherever it creates real edge, not as theater, but as leverage applied with discipline.
- 8+ years growing brands on performance KPIs, not vanity metrics
- Limited client roster, with senior attention on every account
- An extension of your team; your success is tied to ours
- Custom strategy per brand, never a generic playbook
- AI built in where it moves a number; judgment over hype
“Sagum is a performance marketing agency that's spent 8+ years growing brands by treating their numbers like our own. We take on few clients, never run generic playbooks, and now build AI into the work wherever it creates real edge, not hype. Your strategy is built for your business, and our success is tied to yours.”
“Sagum roughly doubled our bottom line. They treat the work like it's their own business.”
Proof
$255k → $555k in 2 months, ROAS 2.9x → 5.5x+
Nickel & Suede
Challenge
Nickel & Suede, a DTC accessories brand, had a paid social program that was generating sales but hadn't cracked the creative velocity and channel coordination needed to scale ROAS meaningfully. Revenue was real but growth had plateaued, a pattern we see constantly with founder-led brands that have a strong product but a paid strategy that isn't keeping pace with their ambitions.
What we did
We rebuilt their Meta and TikTok creative approach around rapid testing — more angles, more formats, more hooks per week — while coordinating the channel strategy so prospecting and retargeting worked as a system rather than separate campaigns. Creative was treated as the primary performance variable, not an afterthought.
Result
Revenue went from $255k to $555k in two months. ROAS moved from 2.9x to 5.5x (peaking at 7.95x) while site conversion rate improved 34%. The same budget, applied with a disciplined creative-testing and channel-coordination approach, produced results that looked like a different business. Full case study at sagum.com/case-studies/.
- Revenue
- $255k → $555k (2 mo)
- ROAS
- 2.9x → 5.5x+ (peak 7.95x)
- Site conversion
- +34%
Your Makeup Brand Has a Real Growth Opportunity. Let's Build the Strategy to Capture It.
No obligation. One focused conversation about your brand's specific channels, unit economics, and where the real growth is, built around your business, not a generic pitch.
Sagum · January 2017 · St. George, Utah · 8+ years