Optimising Tesselaar Seasonal Retail Acquisition
A seasonal acquisition program that connected media, audience and ecommerce signals to protect efficiency and rebuild growth.
The Challenge
Tesselaar's retail calendar creates distinct peaks in demand, customer intent and product availability. Sonar built a seasonal acquisition program that adapted channel investment, audiences and creative as those conditions changed. Across the supplied 2026 Summer, Winter and opening Spring reporting windows, paid media delivered a 23x blended return on ad spend. At the Spring launch, paid revenue finished 13% ahead of the comparable 2025 period.
The launch of a new ecommerce experience changed the signals available to paid platforms and introduced a period of adjustment for customers and campaign algorithms. Performance was also affected by seasonal demand, stock availability and changing average order values. Tesselaar needed to protect high-intent revenue, find the right role for each channel and build stronger momentum for the next catalogue period.
The Solution
Sonar treated each catalogue as an optimisation cycle, using the combined view of media, website and merchandising performance to guide decisions.
- Protected high-intent Google demand while progressively scaling Shopping and Performance Max where efficiency supported it.
- Shifted budget toward Meta when its audience and creative performance strengthened, with returning buyers, email subscribers and lookalikes used to concentrate investment around higher intent.
- Built clearance, scarcity and product-led creative around seasonal demand and available stock, then refreshed the mix as each sales period changed.
- Used website, conversion and campaign QA alongside channel reporting so paid-media results were interpreted in the context of the full ecommerce journey.
Why It Worked
The work connected channel optimisation with the conditions shaping customer behaviour. Budget followed the strongest demand signals, returning customers received more relevant messaging, and creative reflected both seasonal offers and product availability.
That made it possible to protect efficient demand capture while changing the media mix as performance shifted.
