The brand's 55 retail doors were the business as far as most of the organisation was concerned, and the DTC site had been built and then largely left alone. Nobody owned the product feed as an ongoing job, so as prices and imagery drifted out of sync with what Google expected, disapprovals crept up until a third of the catalogue could no longer appear in Shopping results at all.

Because the feed was broken, there was nothing to build paid Shopping or catalogue campaigns on top of. No Google Shopping or Meta catalogue campaigns existed at all, so whatever traffic the site attracted came from channels that could not show the brand's actual products with accurate prices and imagery.

Retail promotions made things worse rather than better. Store discounts and offers ran on their own calendar with no reference to the website, so retail pricing routinely undercut the DTC site, giving a shopper every reason to buy in a store instead of online, and turning whatever paid traffic did arrive into traffic that converted poorly.

We treated the feed as the foundation everything else depended on. A managed feed pipeline normalised titles, GTINs, imagery and pricing across all 1,800 SKUs, resolving the missing identifiers and mismatched prices that had been triggering disapprovals, so the catalogue could finally pass Google Merchant Center's checks at scale.

With a clean feed in place, we launched Google Performance Max and Meta catalogue campaigns for the first time, giving the brand paid Shopping and catalogue presence it had never had. Best-seller landing pages replaced the generic homepage as the destination for that traffic, so clicks landed somewhere built around the products actually being promoted.

We also closed the gap between retail and DTC. Promotion calendars were synced so store discounts and site pricing moved together instead of competing, and revenue reporting moved into a single dashboard so performance across both paid channels could be read in one place instead of stitched together after the fact.