Magnolia fashion

Fashion retail

Short-form video

Magnolia Fashion is a mid-premium women’s brand with $80–$180 price points, a polished editorial aesthetic, and a customer who trusts people more than ads. Despite a strong Instagram presence, growth had stalled and paid social looked better than it performed, with CAC stuck at an unsustainable $94.

Platforms

Date

Nov 2025

magnolia

The challenge

Fashion is one of the most visually saturated categories on every platform. Magnolia's content was genuinely good — well-shot, well-styled, consistent — but it was broadcasting into a void. No community interaction, no creator relationships, no word-of-mouth engine. The brand looked established but felt invisible. The paid campaigns were running studio creative to cold audiences, which explained the $94 CAC: high-gloss fashion content at the top of the funnel doesn't convert people who've never heard of you.

Our strategy

We killed the cold paid campaigns immediately and redirected the budget into a tiered influencer strategy. We identified 22 micro-influencers in the fashion and lifestyle space — all between 8,000 and 45,000 followers, all with documented engagement rates above 4.5%. No macro influencers, no celebrity posts. The insight behind this: Magnolia's price point required purchase trust, and trust comes from creators whose audiences feel like friends, not fans. Each creator received two pieces and full creative freedom — no scripts, no mandatory talking points, no watermarks. We briefed on the brand story and stepped back. In parallel, we built a UGC activation for existing customers: a styled photo with a branded tag earned a 15% discount code on their next order. We also rebuilt Magnolia's Pinterest presence from near-zero, treating it as a long-tail discovery and intent capture channel with keyword-optimised boards for every product category. On TikTok, we focused on video watch rate as the north star metric — specifically engineering the first three seconds of every post to drive completion, not just impressions.

The results

A 22-influencer campaign reached 4.2 million accounts in its first wave, with 6 creators generating $112,000 in affiliate-driven revenue within 30 days. CAC fell from $94 to $31, TikTok watch rate reached 78% versus a 31% platform average, and Pinterest drove strong traffic within 60 days with 9,400 saves and a 3.2% CTR to Magnolia.