Turning Founder-Led Creative Into a Scalable Engine
€6-figure/month DTC Wellness Brand (under NDA)
The Problem
This brand was already winning — consistently doing €6 figures per month in revenue — but growth was fragile.
Creative performance depended heavily on the founders’ energy and intuition. When they were hands-on, ads worked. When they stepped back, momentum slowed.
On paper, everything looked fine:
Strong product–market fit
Aggressive paid spend across Meta, Google, YouTube, Snapchat
Editors, media buyer, agencies, and contractors all “doing the work”
But in reality:
Creative strategy lived in people’s heads
Testing was reactive, not planned
Winning creatives weren’t logged, iterated, or compounded
Founders were constantly pulled back into Slack, Monday, and ad accounts
The team was busy — but there was no creative operating system behind the output.
The Intervention
I came in as an outside operator to translate founder instinct into something the team could actually run without them.
Not to replace creativity — but to protect it.
My role was to sit between:
founders
internal team
agencies
…and design the missing Creative Ops layer that connected ideas, execution, and performance into one system.
The System (How It Worked)
Using their existing stack — Notion, Monday, Slack, Shopify, Triple Whale, and ad platforms — I designed a Creative & Marketing OS v1.
Upstream (Strategy & Planning)
Central idea & testing backlog (Notion)
Clear weekly planning rules:
new concepts vs iterations
video vs static
product focus split
Simple decision logic: test → kill → iterate → scale
Execution (Production & Launch)
Standardized creative statuses in Monday (Idea → Scripted → In Production → Ready → Live → Completed)
Consistent naming + tagging so creatives were traceable across tools
Reduced Slack noise by making Monday the source of truth
Downstream (Performance & Learning)
Unified view of:
creatives launched per week
new vs iteration mix
format mix
performance by concept / strategist
A creative log that captured concept → spend → result → learning
Dashboards that made performance patterns visible without digging into ad accounts
No new tools. No heavy process. Just enough structure for creative output to compound instead of reset.
The Outcome
The founders finally had:
Visibility without micromanaging
A creative engine that didn’t collapse when they stepped away
Agencies working inside a system, not alongside it
A clear line between ideas, output, and revenue impact
At a €6-figure monthly scale, even small improvements mattered:
Better iteration instead of creative churn
Less wasted spend on underperforming concepts
More predictable growth driven by systems, not adrenaline
The biggest win wasn’t efficiency — it was removing founder dependency from creative execution.
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Posted Jan 2, 2026
Designed a scalable Creative Ops system for a DTC wellness brand.