Machina
Artisan goods packing bench in warm workshop light: unlabeled kraft boxes and tissue paper, wooden crates of packaged products, small-batch craft feel

Consumer Goods

Consumer Goods Marketing Agency That Wins the Second Order

Machina is a growth marketing agency in Hollister that grows CPG and DTC brands: paid social run on MER and new-customer CAC, Klaviyo retention flows timed to consumption cycles, and creative testing that outpaces ad fatigue. We took an e-commerce brand to 180% sales growth, with first traction in 60 days.

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Proof

Results, in the numbers a brand runs on

Sales growth, email revenue, and retention, in the clients' own numbers. Read the full case studies.

Consumer Products

E-Commerce Brand

+180%
Sales growth

An online consumer brand with falling conversion and content reaching people who would never buy. Full-lifecycle email automation and personalization turned it: sales up 180%, churn cut 45%, first measurable traction inside 60 days.

Read the case study

E-commerce

Apparel Brand

$541K
Email revenue in 6 months

An apparel brand is a consumer brand: the repeat purchase decides the margin. Deliverability repair, rebuilt templates, and a VIP program produced $541K in email revenue and 14,000 members from a standing start.

Read the case study

Customer Experience

SaaS Platform

8.2% → 4.5%
Monthly churn

A SaaS platform, not a shelf product, but the same LTV math a subscription brand lives on: onboarding and lifecycle work cut monthly churn from 8.2% to 4.5% and lifted six-month retention 60%.

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What makes Consumer Goods different

The squeeze this business runs under

Consumer brands get pinched from both ends of the P&L. Meta CPMs rose 20% in a year to $14.19 and Google CPCs climbed about 13%, while iOS privacy limits scramble the attribution that justifies the spend. At retail, slotting fees, trade spend, MAP enforcement, and Amazon third-party sellers undercutting your own site all tax the same 40–60% gross margin. And across 156,110 DTC customers studied, 18.8% ever placed a second order. We plan around all of it, in contribution-margin math.

What we hear

What founders tell us on the first call

Four complaints we hear from brand owners, and what we do about each.

“Our ROAS looks fine and we still lose money”

A 1.93x platform ROAS, the 2025 Meta median across roughly 35,000 ecommerce brands, can lose money once COGS, 3PL fees, and shipping come out. We run paid social against MER and new-customer CAC instead, with post-purchase surveys checking what the platforms claim.

Paid Ads

“Customers buy once and disappear”

Across 156,110 DTC customers studied, 18.8% ever placed a second order, and 76.4% of those who reorder do it within 90 days. We build replenishment flows timed to your product's consumption cycle and subscribe-and-save offers that make the second order the default.

Email Marketing

“Our winning ad died after three weeks”

Winning creative burns out in 2–4 weeks, and the auction punishes brands that can't feed it. Our AI-assisted production pipeline turns reviews, founder footage, and UGC into 5–10 fresh concepts a month, so testing volume keeps pace with fatigue.

AI Automation

“Amazon sellers outrank our own site for our own brand name”

Third-party sellers and retailer pages hijack branded searches and take the margin with them. We lock down your branded results and build content for the "best" and "vs" queries buyers type before they know you, so discovery lands on pages you own.

SEO

What we do

Five services, run on contribution margin

ROAS pressure on one side, retention economics on the other. Each service below is built for the P&L of a $1M–$50M consumer brand.

Web Development

Template Shopify stores convert under 2%, and ad auctions don't discount for weak product pages. We build sub-2-second storefronts with a dedicated landing page per ad concept, subscription and bundle logic (subscribe-and-save, build-a-box), and post-purchase surveys wired in so attribution survives iOS privacy limits. For retail-first brands, where-to-buy pages turn your DTC traffic into shelf velocity at the stores that stock you.

SEO

Consumable buyers type durable-intent queries: "best," "vs," ingredient safety, use cases. We build content that ranks for them and gets cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, then lock down your branded results against Amazon third-party sellers and retailer pages. Ad costs inflated 13–20% last year; a ranking you own doesn't reprice at auction.

Paid Ads

Meta and TikTok run against new-customer CAC and MER, never platform ROAS alone, with the 2025 benchmarks in view: 1.93x median ROAS, $14.19 CPMs, $38.19 average CPA. A creative cadence of UGC, founder story, and offer tests beats the 2–4 week fatigue cycle. For brands on shelves, we layer retail media (Amazon, Instacart, Walmart Connect) and geo-targeted campaigns around stocking retailers to move units per store per week.

Email Marketing

The full Klaviyo stack: welcome, abandonment, post-purchase, winback, and replenishment flows timed to your product's consumption cycle. Email should carry about 27% of ecommerce revenue, with automated flows generating 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends. Most sub-$10M brands run three basic flows and leave 20–30% of revenue unclaimed. Email acquires customers at $8–15 against $40–80 on paid social; we rebalance accordingly.

AI Automation

We automate the work that eats founder weeks. AI-assisted creative production feeds paid social 5–10 new concepts a month. Review mining surfaces the objection language that belongs in ads and product pages. Post-purchase survey analysis shows which channel drove the order after iOS blinded the pixel. And wholesale inquiries route straight into your CRM, so a distributor or retail buyer never waits on a founder's inbox.

Who we work with

Who we work with

Category by category, the margin math changes, and so does the plan.

Food & beverage

The cheapest CPMs in ecommerce, around $8, and $45–53 CAC. The Salinas Valley's $4 billion crop economy spins off value-added brands constantly; the ones that scale pair demo-friendly products with replenishment flows.

Beauty & personal care

TikTok Shop's flagship category at $2.49 billion in 2025 GMV. CAC runs $42–110 by price point, so subscription attach and second-order economics decide who grows.

Supplements & wellness

Consumption cycles make replenishment timing the whole game: subscribe-and-save at 5–15% off, churn held under 8–10% monthly. Watsonville is already home to supplement maker Nordic Naturals.

Coffee, wine & craft beverage

Paso Robles ships subscriptions with built-in reorder cycles. Club economics let these brands pay a higher first-order CAC than any shelf competitor and still profit.

Apparel & home goods

CAC near $90 with no consumption cycle to lean on, so VIP programs and winbacks carry retention. Our apparel client took $541K in email revenue from a list that produced nothing.

Farmers-market-to-shelf brands

The Central Coast pattern: launch at the market, land Nob Hill or New Leaf, then stall between regional shelf presence and real DTC growth. We build the velocity campaigns and the ecommerce engine that clear that wall.

AI visibility

AI Search Visibility for Consumer Brands

Shoppers have started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions they used to type into Google: which natural deodorant works, whether an ingredient is safe, which olive oil deserves the subscription. The answer engines pull from review corpora, ingredient pages, and comparison content written in plain, crawlable HTML, and AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, so product claims locked inside scripts never get cited. We structure your product pages, FAQ content, and entity data so the machines can read and recommend you. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best small-batch olive oil in Santa Cruz, we make sure it's you. Our free SEO report scores your AI visibility today, before we touch anything.

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+180%

Sales growth for an e-commerce brand. First traction in 60 days.

18.8%

of DTC customers ever place a second order

$541K

email revenue built on one brand's owned list in six months

Meta will sell you the same customer twice at $38 a head. A replenishment flow timed to the last scoop sells the second jar for pennies.

Case study

From falling conversion to 180% sales growth

The client is an e-commerce consumer brand with a problem most founders will recognize: conversion falling while ad spend held steady, and content reaching people who were never going to buy. We rebuilt the marketing system around automation and personalization. Behavioral triggers replaced batch-and-blast campaigns: abandoned-cart recovery, post-purchase follow-ups, and product recommendations driven by what each customer had browsed and bought. Segmentation put the right products in front of the right buyers instead of the whole list. The numbers moved fast: first measurable traction inside 60 days, sales up 180%, churn down 45%. This is the playbook we run for consumer brands: stop renting attention one auction at a time, and build the owned system that keeps selling after the first order.

Read the case study
+180%
Sales growth
“Our content is finally reaching the right people. The structured approach to automation completely transformed our marketing ROI.”
Mike Johnson, E-commerce Director · E-Commerce Brand

The Second-Order System

How we work

The Second-Order System: three phases, one goal. Customers who come back without being re-bought.

01

Find the margin leaks

A free audit of the whole P&L path: ad account structure, MER against platform ROAS, Klaviyo flow coverage, repeat-purchase rate, site conversion, and whether your attribution survives iOS. Most brands lose more to a missing replenishment flow than to a weak ad.

02

Rebuild acquisition on real numbers

Creative testing restarts at 5–10 concepts a month, with post-purchase surveys checking every platform claim. CAC targets come from your contribution margin, not a benchmark deck, and each ad concept gets a matched landing page so the click converts.

03

Engineer the second order

Replenishment and winback flows go live timed to your consumption cycle, aimed at the 90-day window where 76.4% of reorders happen. Subscribe-and-save converts repeat buyers into forecastable revenue, and reporting tracks MER, new-customer CAC, and repeat rate monthly.

Playbook

The Consumer Goods Marketing Playbook

US direct-to-consumer sales reached $239.75 billion in 2025, 19.2% of all retail ecommerce, per Swell. CPG digital ad spending grew 7.9% to roughly $55 billion the same year (eMarketer), so more brands are bidding against you for customers who, four times out of five, never order twice. Nine tactics we run for consumer brands, each with the math attached.

01

Run the account on MER, not the number Meta shows you

Platform ROAS flatters everyone: across roughly 35,000 ecommerce brands, the 2025 Meta median was 1.93x with a $38.19 average CPA (Triple Whale). Feed that through a real P&L, with COGS at 40–60%, 3PL pick-and-pack, and shipping, and plenty of "profitable" accounts lose money on every new customer. We set targets from contribution margin: blended MER for the business, new-customer CAC against first-order margin plus a repeat rate you can defend. Post-purchase surveys then check what the platforms claim, because after iOS 14.5, Meta, GA4, and reality routinely disagree. Founders who run on these numbers cut the right campaigns; founders on platform ROAS cut whichever dashboard looked worst that week.
02

Feed the algorithm before your winner burns out

Winning ads die in 2–4 weeks, and CPMs rose 20% year over year to $14.19 (Triple Whale, 2025), so each fatigued creative costs more to replace than the last. The brands that hold CAC steady produce 5–10 new concepts a month: UGC, founder story, offer tests, and review-derived angles, then let the auction pick winners. Volume beats polish. A phone-shot testimonial that names the exact objection ("does it leave a white cast?") outperforms a studio spot that names none. We mine your reviews for that language, brief creators against it, and use AI-assisted production to turn one shoot into a month of variants.
03

Build the replenishment flow before the next campaign

Across 156,110 DTC customers analyzed, only 18.8% placed a second order within a year, and 76.4% of those who reorder do it within 90 days (BS&Co, 2025). Time the flow to the product's real consumption window — days, not weeks, before the container runs out. Aim the post-purchase sequence at the second order specifically, since 77% of second purchases are reorders of the same product; cross-sell later. Email converts customers at $8–15 against $40–80 on paid social. The second jar should never cost you another auction.
04

Get email past three basic flows

Email carries about 27% of ecommerce revenue per Klaviyo's benchmark of 265,000 stores, and automated flows generate roughly 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends. Most sub-$10M brands run welcome, abandoned cart, and a monthly campaign, which leaves 20–30% of revenue unclaimed. The full stack: welcome with an offer test, browse and cart abandonment, post-purchase aimed at order two, winback at the churn point, replenishment on the consumption cycle, and a VIP tier for the top decile. We built this for an apparel brand and produced $541K in email revenue in six months, with 14,000 VIP members from a standing start.
05

Put impulse-priced products on TikTok Shop

US TikTok Shop sales hit $15.82 billion in 2025, up 108% year over year, with beauty and personal care generating $2.49 billion in GMV alone (eMarketer). For products under $50 with visual payoff, it is the cheapest discovery-to-checkout loop in commerce: more than 687,000 active US affiliate creators sell on commission, so you pay for orders instead of impressions. The costs are operational rather than media: constant sample seeding, creator management, and enough creative volume to stay in the feed. If your product demos well in fifteen seconds, the channel deserves a real test before your next CPM increase.
06

Defend your branded search before you buy more discovery

Type your own brand into Google. If Amazon third-party listings or a retailer's page outrank your site, you're paying to send customers to someone else's margin. Lock the branded results first: your product pages, your FAQ content, your reviews. Then build SEO content for the durable-intent queries consumable buyers type: "best," "vs," ingredient safety, use cases, the searches that keep converting while ad costs inflate. Google CPCs climbed about 13% in 2025 alone. AI answers raise the stakes: ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews cite plain, crawlable comparison content, and a citation there is discovery you never pay auction prices for.
07

Spend retail media where it moves velocity, not where it harvests

Retail media passed $60 billion in US annual ad spend and now takes roughly 39% of CPG advertising budgets (Marketing LTB, 2025). Spent well, it lifts the units-per-store-per-week numbers a category buyer judges you on, which is what protects shelf space at reset. Spent badly, it harvests demand you already created from shoppers who searched your brand name. Run incrementality checks before scaling any placement, cap branded-term spend, and put the savings into geo-targeted social around stocking retailers, where a new customer discovers you and the buyer sees velocity move. If you're on shelves at Nob Hill or New Leaf, that loop is your best defense against discontinuation.
08

Make the site convert before you raise the budget

The auction sets your click price; only your site sets your conversion rate. Template Shopify stores convert under 2%, and raising conversion even modestly compounds like a budget increase, without buying more clicks. The fixes are known: sub-2-second product pages, a dedicated landing page per ad concept so the promise in the ad matches the page, product copy mined from your own reviews' objection language, and subscribe-and-save presented before checkout instead of after. Wire a post-purchase survey into the order confirmation while you're in there. One question, "where did you first hear about us," settles attribution arguments the pixel no longer can.
09

Grow like a Central Coast brand

The Central Coast has been building consumer brands since Martinelli's started pressing Watsonville apples in 1868; about 95% of the town's apple harvest still goes into those bottles. Watsonville alone headquarters Driscoll's, California Giant, and Nordic Naturals, and the Salinas Valley's $4 billion crop economy keeps spinning off value-added food brands. We watch the same pattern stall: a farmers-market brand lands Nob Hill, New Leaf, or Staff of Life, then hits the wall between regional shelf presence and real DTC growth. Clearing that wall takes both halves at once: velocity campaigns around the stores that stocked you, and an ecommerce engine that turns regional fans into a national list. That gap is exactly where we work.

Sources

  1. Across roughly 35,000 ecommerce brands on Meta in 2025, the median ROAS was 1.93x, average CPM $14.19 (up 20% year over year), and average CPA $38.19 (Triple Whale, 2025).
  2. Across 156,110 DTC customers analyzed, only 18.8% placed a second order within 365 days, and 76.4% of those who reorder do it within 90 days (BS&Co, 2025).
  3. US direct-to-consumer ecommerce sales reached $239.75 billion in 2025, 19.2% of all US retail ecommerce (Swell, 2025).
  4. US CPG digital ad spending grew 7.9% to roughly $55 billion in 2025, while total CPG media spend growth slowed to 4.6% (eMarketer, 2025).
  5. TikTok Shop US sales hit $15.82 billion in 2025, up 108% year over year, with beauty and personal care generating $2.49 billion in US GMV (eMarketer, 2025).
  6. US retail media exceeds $60 billion in annual ad spend, and CPG companies allocate roughly 39% of their advertising budgets to it (Marketing LTB, 2025).

Related industries

Explore adjacent verticals

Retail & E-Commerce

The storefront side of the same business: checkout, feeds, and store operations live there; this page runs the brand.

View industry

Consumer Health

Supplements and wellness products, where the same retention math runs under claims scrutiny.

View industry

B2B

The wholesale half of a brand's revenue: distributor, buyer, and retail-account pipelines run on B2B plays.

View industry

Consumer Goods marketing by city

Consumer Goods marketing in San FranciscoConsumer Goods marketing in San JoseSanta Cruz

Consumer Goods

Let's engineer your second order before Q4 CPMs spike

Start with a free audit. We'll pull your ad account, MER against platform ROAS, Klaviyo flow coverage, and repeat-purchase rate, and show you where margin is leaking. Twenty minutes, no obligation.

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Last updated July 4, 2026