Case Study · DTC Skincare
Bondi Essentials
An Australian skincare brand was losing $14,000 a month on ads that looked profitable. The customers they attracted returned almost everything. Nobody could see it because the data lived in 8 different tools.
$14K
Wasted ad spend found (per month)
$1.4M
Revenue recovered (annual)
24 hrs
Time to find the leak
4
Analytics tools cancelled
The Store
Bondi Essentials sells clean skincare products from Sydney, Australia. A former cosmetic chemist started the brand in 2021. Their lip balm went viral on Instagram and within two years they were doing $2.4M a year. Four employees. One Shopify store. Everything looked great on the surface.
Person
Sarah Chen, Head of E-Commerce
Team Size
4 people
Revenue (Before)
$2.4M / year
Platform
Shopify
The Problem Nobody Could See
Sarah was drowning and she did not even know it. Every morning started the same way. Open 8 different apps. Copy numbers into spreadsheets. Try to figure out what was working. Twelve hours every week spent reconciling data instead of growing the business. She was paying $2,400 a month for the privilege.
Their ads used to make $4 back for every $1 they spent. By mid-2025, that number had dropped to $2. Sarah could feel something was wrong. But with the data split across 8 different tools, she could not figure out what was actually happening.
The hidden leak
$14,000 a month was disappearing into ads that looked profitable but were not. The customers those ads brought in returned almost everything they bought. No single tool could see it because ad data, sales data, and returns data all lived in different places.
What EcomBrain Found
Sarah connected all 8 tools to EcomBrain. It took 15 minutes. The next morning she had a report that made her stomach drop. Here is what was hiding in her data the entire time.
Leak #1
Ads that looked great but lost money
3 ad audiences that looked profitable on the surface were a disaster. 73% of the customers they brought in returned their orders. Those audiences were eating 31% of the entire ad budget. That is $14,000 a month going to people who buy, return, and never come back.
Stopped those audiences immediately. Moved the budget to the 5 audiences that actually brought in repeat customers. Ad performance nearly tripled.
Leak #2
Abandoned carts nobody was recovering
$340,000 a year was walking out the door from people who added items to their cart and never checked out. Their existing email setup was only recovering 8 out of every 100 abandoned carts. The industry average for skincare brands is 15 to 22.
Built a smarter recovery sequence. Different offers for different cart sizes. Recovery rate jumped from 8% to 19%.
Leak #3
Two products secretly losing money
A body wash set and a sample kit looked profitable in Shopify. But after factoring in ad spend, shipping costs, and the return rate on those specific items, both products were actually losing money on every sale.
Repriced both products and shifted ad spend to the 5 products with the highest actual profit. Not revenue. Profit.
“We were losing $14,000 a month and I had no idea. I thought our ads were working. EcomBrain showed me the truth in one day. It felt like someone handed me a bag of money I had dropped on the sidewalk.”
Sarah Chen, Head of E-Commerce, Bondi Essentials
The Results
Bondi Essentials pays $800/month for EcomBrain. In the first 6 months, it found and recovered over $168,000 in wasted spend and lost revenue. That is a 35x return.
Wasted Ad Spend Recovered
$168K/yr saved
Annual Revenue
+$1.4M
Ad Efficiency (ROAS)
Nearly 3x improvement
Abandoned Cart Recovery
+$340K/yr
Monthly Tool Costs
-$1,600/mo
Products Losing Money
Fixed
How Fast It Happened
Day 1
Connected all 8 tools. Took 15 minutes.
Day 2
First report arrived. Found 3 ad audiences that were losing money.
Week 1
Stopped the bad audiences. Immediately saved $4,200/month in wasted ad spend.
Week 3
New cart recovery emails went live. Recovery rate jumped from 8% to 14%.
Month 2
Ads now making $3.80 back for every $1 spent. Up from $2.
Month 4
Revenue on track for $3.2M. Sarah stopped doing weekly spreadsheet reports entirely.
Month 6
Revenue hit $3.8M run rate. ROAS at 5.7x. Four analytics tools cancelled.
Results verified by EcomBrain. Individual results will vary. Numbers reflect combined data from early access merchants in similar industries, Q4 2025 to Q1 2026.
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