Home › Testimonials › NutriBlend
NutriBlend on working with Dazzle Commerce
A UK supplements brand that came to us planning to cut acquisition spend, and finished the first quarter raising it. Marisa Chen on the engagement — including the month she thought we were moving too slowly.
MC
Reviewed by Marisa Chen
VP Growth, NutriBlend
SECTOR
Health & Wellness
PLATFORM
WooCommerce
MARKET
United Kingdom
ENGAGEMENT
14 weeks, ongoing
Reviewing subscriber cohort performance against the delivery calendar — the comparison that reframed the engagement.
EXPERT VIEW
“We were about to cut acquisition spend. It turned out we could afford to raise it — we just had to stop shipping people a tub they had not finished.”
Founder · NutriBlend
Published with the client’s approval following the engagement review. This line also appears on the NutriBlend case study.
- Before the call
Why they went looking for an agency
The brief that arrived was not the brief that was needed.
“Our acquisition numbers had been fine for two years and then they weren’t. Media got more expensive, we discounted the offer to compensate, and the lifetime value figure the whole model rested on quietly stopped being true.”
We weren’t looking for a growth agency. We were looking for someone to make paid media cheaper — which, with hindsight, is a request to treat the symptom rather than the illness. The number we could see was cost per acquisition, so that is the number the brief was written about.
Two years of comfortable numbers, then three quarters where nothing the team tried held for longer than six weeks.
- First
What they had already tried
Four things, each of which worked for about six weeks.
“We cut creative spend, tested three new offers and moved a chunk of budget from social to search. Each one helped for a while and then stopped.”
Nobody had gone back to the retention side, because retention wasn’t where the number looked wrong — or so we thought. The churn figure on our dashboard had been broadly flat for a year. It turned out that figure was measuring the wrong thing, but you do not go looking inside a number that is not moving.
- Onboarding
The first ninety days, from their side
What the first month actually felt like from the client’s seat.
“The first fortnight is the part I’d warn other founders about: they didn’t build anything.”
They separated failed payments from real cancellations, rebuilt lifetime value net of refunds, and came back to tell us our churn number was wrong. It was smaller than we had been reporting, which is not the good news it sounds like — it meant we had spent a year managing against a figure that was not real.
Everything after that moved quickly, and the order it moved in was not negotiable. They would not raise acquisition spend until the retention work had landed, and they said so in week one rather than week six. You can read how they run the first thirty days and it is, for what it is worth, what actually happened.
Three weeks of reporting work before anything shipped. It is the least satisfying invoice of the engagement and the one that made the rest possible.
- The finding
What surprised them
The answer was a delivery date sitting in a different system.
The cancellation curve and the delivery calendar overlapped almost exactly, once anyone thought to lay one over the other.
“Our powders last about forty days and we were shipping every thirty.”
Subscribers were stacking up tubs they hadn’t opened, and somewhere around the third delivery they did the maths and cancelled. That was our entire churn problem, described in one sentence.
The consumption data and the shipping calendar had been sitting in two different systems for three years and nobody had put them side by side. Not the previous agency, not our own team, and certainly not me.
- Outcome
What changed
Measured on twelve-month cohorts against a pre-engagement baseline. The methodology behind each figure is published on the case study.
+29%
Subscriber lifetime value
Net of refunds and payment failures, not gross value at signup
-34%
Month-three churn
The window where cancellations had been clustering
+18%
Revenue per email
Across the rebuilt lifecycle programme
11 wks
To payback
On the engagement fee
“The outcome none of us predicted is that we spend more on acquisition now than we did on the day we called them.”
- Their advice
What they would tell another brand considering us
Offered as advice to a peer rather than praise for us.
“Be ready to have your brief rejected.”
We asked for cheaper media and were told the media wasn’t the problem. If you want an agency that executes the brief you hand over, this isn’t it. If you want one that argues with it first, it is.
The second thing I’d say is give them the boring data early. The finding that changed our business came out of a consumption report and a shipping export, neither of which anyone had ever asked us for.
- The criticism
What they would change
Every review on this site carries one of these. We publish them unedited.
“The first month felt slow from the inside.”
We were paying for analysis while nothing shipped, and I raised it twice — once politely and once less so. They were right and I was wrong, and I would still ask any agency to put something in front of you in week two, even if it is only the reporting, because the silence is hard to sit with when you are the one funding it.
- In summary
Rated highest, rated lowest
No stars. Reviews of our own business, hosted on our own site, are not independent and we are not going to dress them up as though they were.
RATED HIGHEST
Willingness to reject the brief, and reporting that holds up when you interrogate it. The churn figure we had been managing against turned out to be wrong, and they found that in week one rather than telling us what we wanted to hear.
RATED LOWEST
Pace in month one. They will not manufacture a quick answer to make the first invoice feel better, and if you need visible movement early, that will be uncomfortable.
- The work behind this review
What actually ran on this account
Four service lines, one team, one plan. Each links to how we run that service generally.
The full methodology, the baseline, the sequencing and what we would do differently.
Lifecycle, onboarding, pre-delivery prompts and win-back — the service that owned the change that mattered here.
The account area and cancellation flow, where a pause became easier to choose than a cancel.
Usage guidance and routine content, replacing the discount-led emails that had trained subscribers to wait.
Resetting the acquisition budget against cohort value once subscriber life extended.
The platform this ran on. No replatform was required, and none was proposed.
- More client stories
Other engagements, told end to end
Individual reviews for these clients are being published one at a time. Until each one lands, the case study is the fuller account.
CLIENT REVIEW
A US cookware brand whose revenue grew while profit stayed flat, and the shipping rule behind it.
CLIENT REVIEW
An appliance brand competing against its own resellers, where the returns and the price war shared a cause.
ALL REVIEWS
Every quote we publish, each sitting next to the work that produced it.
Want the same conversation about your numbers?
Start with the free audit. We will show you where revenue is leaking, what it is worth to fix, and whether we are the right team to do it — including if the answer is no.