Beauty & Wellness · Amazon case study
+92% sales in four months while ACoS fell from 44% to 26%.
A dermatologist-founded skincare brand with real demand and a hard problem: growth was getting more expensive every month. Four months later, sales had nearly doubled while ACoS improved from roughly 44% to 26%.
SLMD Skincare · growth trajectory
+92%
sales growth in 4 months
44% → 26%
ACoS · efficiency up while scaling
10% → 45%
Amazon’s share of the total business over the partnership
The brand
SLMD Skincare
SLMD Skincare is a dermatologist-founded brand competing in one of Amazon’s most contested categories: beauty, where ad auctions are expensive, comparison shopping is relentless, and inefficient accounts get punished fast. The usual trade-off in beauty is stark: you can scale, or you can be efficient. This engagement had to do both at once.
SLMD Skincare by Dr. Sandra Lee
Where things stood
The starting position.
01
ACoS running at roughly 44%, which meant growth was being bought at a price that ate the margin.
02
A category where entrenched competitors and high CPCs punish unstructured spend.
03
Scale and efficiency needed to improve together, not be traded against each other.
What we did
The work.
01
Full-funnel advertising restructure focused on contribution margin at the query level.
02
Systematic elimination of wasted spend: negation, placement optimization, and budget reallocation toward what converted.
03
Conversion-focused listing and creative improvements so more expensive clicks turned into customers.
Start to finish
ACoS, day one
44%
→
ACoS, month four
26%
While monthly sales grew 92% over the same period
How it played out
The result.
The four-month sprint: sales grew 92% while ACoS improved from roughly 44% to 26%, spending into growth the whole way. Over the partnership as a whole, Amazon grew from roughly 10% of the total business to 45%.
In a category this competitive, that combination is the whole ballgame: efficient scale that protects margin as the business gets bigger.
The creative
What shoppers actually saw.
The boards below shipped on the live listing. Design and strategy from the same team that ran the numbers above. Click any board for full size.
The audit is free, and it’s real work
Your category could be next.
Tell us where the business is and where you want it to go. A senior operator, not a salesperson, reviews your public presence and whatever you share, then walks you through exactly what we’d do differently and what it’s worth. And if the honest answer is that your current setup is working, we’ll tell you that too.