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Caroline Gardner grew a new DTC channel into consistent year on year growth with Atomic

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547 547 K

Conversion Value (2025)
➚ 88.4%

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7.85 7.85

ROAS (2026 YTD)
➚ 11.5%

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The Brief:

Turn a strong wholesale brand into a proven, scalable DTC growth channel – starting from zero paid performance data and a modest budget.

Caroline Gardner is one of the UK’s most respected independent greeting card and stationery designers, working from studios overlooking the River Thames in West London. Founded in 1993, the brand is known for distinctive designs spanning paper, accessories and lifestyle products.

The brand’s reputation was built on design and a strong wholesale business. Their direct to consumer side, however, was new territory. When they partnered with Atomic in 2024, DTC had no paid ads history and effectively no performance data to build from, despite the strength of the brand behind it.

Caroline Gardner’s reputation and customer trust were built through design and wholesale, but the DTC side hadn’t yet found its own audience through paid channels. The challenge was to:

grow a genuinely new revenue channel with a strong brand but no DTC performance data to reference
prove the model on a modest starting budget before committing further investment
scale spend year on year without losing sight of commercial targets and margins
build DTC into a channel that could stand alongside the established wholesale business

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The Solution

Start small, prove performance, then scale with confidence.

Atomic started with a tightly controlled test budget, proved the DTC model, then scaled investment year on year as the data strengthened.

Atomic launched Caroline Gardner’s DTC paid activity from a standing start, treating it much like building a start up, no historical data, but a brand with genuine recognition to lean on. Google Ads began on a tightly managed £300 monthly budget, focused on proving performance before scaling.

As that early data came in, spend was increased deliberately year on year, growing the DTC channel into a consistent, reliable part of the business rather than a one off campaign push.

Our approach included:

building a DTC performance baseline from zero, despite an already well known brand
starting on a modest, tightly managed budget to prove the model
scaling spend year on year based on evidence, not assumption
accepting a planned trade off in ROAS during the heaviest growth phase, in exchange for volume
recovering and strengthening efficiency once the account matured at the new spend level

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The Results

The first year established that DTC could work as a meaningful growth channel, generating £290k in conversion value from £20.8k in spend. With that foundation in place, Atomic scaled investment significantly in 2025, increasing spend by 249% while growing conversion value by 88% to £547k.

That momentum continued into 2026. By 17 September, conversion value had already reached £489k, up 72.7% year on year, while ROAS improved to 7.85. The result was a DTC channel that had moved from an unproven test into a scalable, increasingly efficient revenue stream.

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88.4 88.4 %