CASE_004
AKIO
The Brief
Studio Akio is an independent beauty brand founded in 2021 by a cosmetic chemist and a former magazine editor who met during the pandemic and decided the category was broken. Their products — a tightly edited line of twelve SKUs built around skin barrier function — were genuinely good. Their distribution was entirely DTC. Their paid CAC, by the time they came to us, was €94 and climbing.
The founders had done what every early-stage beauty brand is told to do: Meta ads, a gifting programme to micro-influencers, a TikTok account managed by a 23-year-old they'd hired on a short contract. It had worked well enough to get them to 14,000 customers. It was not going to get them to 180,000.
The deeper problem was structural. Every customer they acquired through paid had essentially no relationship with the brand. They bought once, often on promotion, and didn't come back. The repeat purchase rate was 19%. The founders knew this was the real number — not the follower count, not the ROAS — and it was the one they couldn't fix with more spend.
They came to us asking for a new content strategy. We told them the content wasn't the problem. The relationship was.
The Approach
A month of diagnosis before a single post was written or brief was sent. We audited every channel, every email flow, every piece of creator content that had gone out under the Kindred name or in association with it. We mapped the fourteen customers who had purchased more than five times — interviewed six of them — and found that almost all of them had discovered Kindred through a single piece of long-form content: a 2,200-word essay the co-founder had written about the cosmetic industry's relationship with fragrance, published on a Substack she'd since abandoned.
That essay had an 81% read-through rate. It had sent 340 people to the website in the week it published. Eleven of Kindred's top fourteen customers had cited it, unprompted, as the reason they trusted the brand.
The answer was already there. We just had to build a system around it.
We proposed replacing the influencer gifting programme — 60+ semi-random sends per month — with a closed network of twelve creators, each selected not for audience size but for genuine alignment with the brand's point of view on skin. Each creator received a full editorial brief, a quarterly call with the co-founder, and a single directive: make content you'd make anyway, but let us shape the frame.
Kindred didn't need more reach. They needed more of the right people to stay. Those are opposite problems with opposite solutions.
— Marco Treves, Strategy Lead
The System
Three operators. One creative director managing brand voice and the creator network, one editor overseeing the newsletter and the co-founder's essay series, one strategist tracking retention metrics and guiding the content mix.
The co-founder published one essay per month — long, specific, never promotional — on the Substack relaunched under the Kindred name. Each essay was seeded to the twelve creators in the network ahead of publication, with a brief note inviting (never requiring) a response in their own format. Some posted a reel. Some wrote their own piece. Some said nothing. All of it was on their terms.
No paid spend of any kind for the first twelve months. The Meta account was left live but dark. TikTok was handed back to the co-founder and used only when she had something specific to say — never on a schedule, never with a trending audio. The gifting programme was cut from 60+ sends to twelve, all of them the network.
The newsletter went from bi-monthly to weekly in month four, once open rates confirmed the audience was ready for it. Every email was written by a human, edited by us, and read like a letter rather than a broadcast.
The 22-Month Arc
Month | Phase | What We Did |
|---|---|---|
MO 01 | Audit | Full channel and customer audit. Six customer interviews. Creator network shortlisted. Substack relaunched. Paid campaigns paused. |
MO 02–03 | Foundation | Twelve creators briefed and onboarded. First co-founder essay published. Newsletter cadence rebuilt. Repeat purchase rate: 19%. |
MO 04–06 | Signal | Newsletter open rate reaches 58%. Second essay shared by three network creators to a combined audience of 280k. Repeat purchase rate climbs to 31%. Customer count: 22,000. |
MO 07–10 | Compounding | Creator content begins generating consistent inbound with no seeding beyond the network. A reel by one network member reaches 2.1M views. No paid amplification. Customer count: 51,000. |
MO 11–14 | Community | A private community for repeat customers (4+ purchases) launched via the newsletter. 3,400 join in the first month. Repeat purchase rate: 47%. Customer count: 94,000. |
MO 15–18 | Acceleration | Paid reintroduced — narrowly, only to retarget newsletter subscribers who hadn't yet purchased. CAC drops to €11. Customer count: 138,000. |
MO 19–22 | Scale | 180,000 customers. 87% have made more than one purchase. Co-founder essay series optioned for a print run by a London publisher. Altrix retained ongoing. |
The Outcome
Twenty-two months. Zero paid spend for the first twelve. Twelve creators, one editorial direction, one co-founder essay per month. Kindred went from 14,000 customers with a 19% repeat rate to 180,000 customers with an 87% repeat rate — without ever running a campaign that looked like a campaign.
Before · MO 01 | After · MO 22 | |
|---|---|---|
Total customers | 14,000 | 180,000 |
Repeat purchase rate | 19% | 87% |
Paid CAC | €94 | €11 (reintroduced surgically) |
Newsletter open rate | 31% | 61% |
Active creator network | 60+ (ungoverned gifting) | 12 (editorial network) |
Paid spend | Active (Meta + TikTok) | €0 for first 12 months |
What the Client Said
We were taught that beauty is a paid media game. Altrix proved it isn't — or at least, it doesn't have to be. Our customers now feel like readers. Some of them feel like friends.
— Isla Vance, Co-founder, Studio Akio
Credits
Role | Name |
|---|---|
Creative Direction | Lina Aalto — Founder & CD, Altrix |
Strategy | Marco Treves — Strategy Lead, Altrix |
Editor | Theo Aubert — Senior Editor, Altrix |
Client | Isla Vance & Dr. Petra Voss — Co-founders, Kindred |