Helping Ocean & San become and stay cash flow positive

“Artifex is able to combine their expertise in paid media, creative strategy, and finance into a singular service dripping with value. We can't believe we stayed with our last provider for so long”

Alec & Jake - Co-Founders

About the client

Ocean & San was founded to create a fundamental change in the way most people approach the sport of cycling.

Two friends from California with a passion for cycling and the outdoors started Ocean & San. Giving casual riders something to wear that they’d never seen before.

Very quickly, the brand started to take off.

The problem

In 2022, after seeing some initial success, Jake & Alec brought on a freelance media buyer to help grow their brand. The first few months seemed promising.

But, after about 6 months, they couldn’t figure out why they were being told that their brand was “scaling,” but they had fewer and fewer dollars in the bank at the end of each month.

They were now spending a ton of money on ads, and exorbitant fees to their freelancer, but couldn’t find any profit leftover.

The solution

Jake & Alec were referred to Artifex by a mutual friend. Artifex ran an audit of their their paid media program & business financials.

They quickly found out that they were losing cash at a far greater rate than what they had thought. Their freelancer was bringing the company finances down to an extremely low level and he didn’t even know it.

For almost 2 months, Ocean & San was spending money on ads and losing cash on their advertising almost every single day in September & October.

(And that was before their freelancer took his fees)

Jake & Alec’s hunch was right. They needed to pivot or they would run out of cash to fuel their growth.

Ocean & San decided to sign with Artifex.

The results

At Artifex we:

• Completely overhauled their Facebook ads, changing the way they buy media & report on performance
• Optimized their paid program to ensure daily profitability by switching to cost controlled campaigns & reporting on Ocean’s financial outcomes, not pixel-based ones.
• Remade their Google Merchant Center Feed from scratch & fixed Google’s conversion tracking (which was double counting). We then turned their Google Ads profitable.
• Moved all of our creative strategy & briefing work within Figma & collaborated on unique advertising angles for their brand. Testing en masse before finding winners.
• Launched “This Shirt is the Sh*t” marketing campaign en masse over the holiday season
• Directed the entire media program toward first order profitability on new customer acquisition.

Here’s how it’s going:

Ocean & San became profitable again and their ad program added cash to their bottom line rather than subtract it.

They also started acquiring new customers at a much faster rate. Profitably.

Oh, and their ads look amazing.

We’re going to be working with Ocean for years to come. And we’ll be making sure that we’re growing their brand profitably and sustainably.

“Artifex is able to combine their expertise in paid media, creative strategy, and finance into a singular service dripping with value. We can't believe we stayed with our last provider for so long” - Alec & Jake - Co-Founders