🥵 CHALLENGE

Growth past a revenue plateau.

Growth had stalled around $550K in revenue. The creative was functional but not converting at the rate needed to push past the plateau. The harder problem was that Kirrin Finch has a strong, specific brand identity — one that exists for a community that had been underserved by mainstream fashion. Creative that pushed too hard on conversion signals would feel off-brand. Creative that played it too safe wouldn't move the needle.

The channel mix also needed rethinking. The brand was primarily running on a narrow set of placements and hadn't seriously explored Pinterest, which turned out to be a significant missed opportunity for an apparel brand with strong lifestyle imagery.

🧠 SOLUTION

Iterative and performance-driven workflows.

My creative direction focused on three things: staying true to the brand's visual identity, leading with lifestyle over product, and testing systematically rather than guessing.

For social ads, I designed static creative that reflected the brand's community — real people, genuine contexts, the clothes worn rather than displayed. I worked with the account manager to advocate for product shoots that would give us the lifestyle assets we needed, which meant influencing the client's production decisions upstream of the design work.

For email, I partnered with the lifecycle rep on strategy and handled all design execution. I ran A/B tests constantly — safe on-brand assets vs elevated custom designs, short vs long form, different heading and CTA treatments. The testing discipline was as important as the creative quality. Every send was a question about the audience.

Design-Systems Note:

I built production templates for both social and email that could be adapted across campaigns without rebuilding from scratch. The goal was consistency at scale — when you're producing creative across multiple campaigns and channels simultaneously, a loose system creates visual drift.

The templates stayed close to Kirrin Finch's established brand: their typography, color palette, and visual tone. My job was to push the application of the system into contexts that converted, not to redesign the brand.

💎 RESULTS

Revenue crossed $1M.

The account team credited the creative approach as a meaningful contributor to the growth.

Beyond the revenue number: the lifestyle creative direction became the client's standard going forward. I was able to inform their future product shoots based on what we learned was working — which meant the creative insights had upstream impact on how they approached production, not just how they ran ads.

Pinterest became a meaningful channel for the brand where it previously hadn't been explored seriously.

Reflections:

What I keep coming back to on this account is the relationship between brand integrity and performance. The temptation in performance marketing is to optimize everything — more hooks, more offers, more formats. That instinct is right in general and wrong for Kirrin Finch specifically.

The brand's strength is its specificity. Its community is loyal because the brand reflects them accurately. Creative that chases short-term conversion metrics at the cost of that authenticity might lift a number this quarter while eroding the thing that makes the brand worth buying from long-term.

Holding that tension — being rigorous about performance while being protective of brand — is one of the harder things in this kind of work. I got better at it on this account.