Food brands: where sales were stuck and what we changed

From €4,452 to €37,205 a week: how a Berlin doughnut shop reached €1M in sales

Case study: direct sales, parcel-friendly offers, ads and production pace

The business context

Doughnut Time makes premium doughnuts. The founder opened a shop next to the TV tower in Berlin. He wasn’t from the city, and the estate agent showed him the space on public holidays. He trusted him and signed a five-year lease.

Then came the ordinary days. The shop sold a few dozen doughnuts a day. A few hundred, only on holidays or when there was an event. Production could make more than 15,000 doughnuts a month.

What sold on the street couldn’t cover the rent.

The founder wanted to sell at full capacity. Instead, he saw himself stuck for five years in a space that couldn’t carry the volume he had imagined.

Where growth was stuck

Distribution meant a few shops nearby, in a city with a doughnut shop on every corner.

The website already existed but sold very little: €4,452 a week, less than the business was investing in marketing. It was more a cost than a source of revenue.

And online, a product that goes stale quickly runs into one question: “will it arrive in good shape?”

It showed in a few simple places:

• —the site didn’t show what customers wanted to see: delivery and packaging;
• —we didn’t yet know which offer people would buy by courier;
• —price and shipping fee blocked the decision in the cart;
• —campaigns weren’t built around the moments when people buy gifts;
• —sales depended on the weather, foot traffic and a few distributors.

The strategic direction

The direction was to make direct sales the business’s second engine, not one more online shop nobody sees. And to make delivery part of the promise: premium doughnuts, delivered to your door, packed with care.

We used craving as the way in, but built trust as the reason to buy.

We then saw that the best orders didn’t come from Berlin, where you find doughnuts on every corner. Villages and small towns did best, because premium desserts are hard to find there.

And we built campaigns around the moments when people buy the most: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Christmas and new flavours.

What we changed

First, we checked whether people would buy. We rebuilt the site around what customers expect to see, with delivery and packaging in plain view, and launched a few small test offers.

Then we worked on the offer. We set the price so every order makes money. We didn’t lower it; we raised it. We made shipping cheaper and reworked the bundles: a pricier product with cheap shipping sold better than a cheap product with expensive shipping.

We made video and image ads for Facebook and Google. Every video showed, in the first seconds, how we pack the doughnuts.

We added a money-back guarantee if the doughnuts didn’t arrive in good shape. Purchases rose by more than 50%.

After the first 4,000 customers we started email, so sales no longer depended only on new people brought in by ads.

The strike before Valentine’s Day

Orders grew faster than production could keep up. Before Valentine’s Day there were so many that the staff refused to come to work. The loss: €20,000 in undelivered doughnuts and refunds.

Since then, pace is part of the system: we sell more when production has room and less when it’s full. Good direct sales aren’t the ones that sell the most. They’re the ones that sell exactly what you can produce.

The results and what they mean

• —€300K in sales in the first year of working together and €1M in the second, close to full production capacity.
• —Over €100K in a single month; the best month reached €120K. The best week: €37,205, up from €4,452 at the start.
• —20,000 customers with address and phone number, owned by the business, not by a distributor. It still sells to them by email, SMS and WhatsApp.
• —A new B2B line: doughnuts for companies’ team-building days and events.
• —A business that no longer depends on distributors, the weather or foot traffic.

The difference wasn’t the ad. It was everything we built around it.

What the client says

What you can take from this project

A product people want also has to be easy to buy. And big production capacity needs a road to the customer that you control.

Doughnut Time could make more than 15,000 doughnuts a month and had a shop that sold a few dozen a day. The problem wasn’t the product. It was the road to the customer.

Look at what blocks the purchase, not just at what grabs attention. And once sales take off, keep them at the pace of production.

3× more buyers from the same traffic: how we grew Oh!Good Romania

Case study: growth marketing, brand localisation & conversion optimisation

The business context

Some brands enter a new market with the product ready, the website working and the feeling that things should move fairly quickly.

Except a new market doesn't buy automatically just because the product exists.

Oh!Good is a plant-based nutrition brand, with protein powders and complete meals. The brand was already active in several countries and had its infrastructure in place: products, an online store and a clear business direction.

Romania, however, came with its own questions.

People want to know whether the product tastes good, whether it keeps them full, whether it's worth the money, whether it fits their life, and whether it isn't just “another vegan product” that promises more than it delivers.

When we started working together, Oh!Good was present in Romania but didn't yet speak naturally enough to the local audience. It lacked the clarity and local trust that turn interest into an order.

Where growth was stuck

The problem was what happened after people reached the site.

In January 2025, out of every 100 people who visited the site, roughly 1 bought. And in an online store, the difference between 1 buyer and 3 buyers from the same traffic can completely change how efficient your campaigns are.

It showed in a few simple places:

• —The copy was correct, but didn't sound natural enough for the Romanian market.
• —Product pages explained, but didn't answer the questions that come up before buying well enough.
• —The ads got attention, but didn't build enough trust yet.
• —Local content needed real people, credible voices and examples that made the product feel familiar.

Between the product and the purchase, an important layer was missing: trust.

And without that layer, a bigger ad budget would have brought more people into a system that wasn't yet ready to convince them.

The strategic direction

The direction was to build trust first.

It wasn't enough to translate Oh!Good into Romanian and launch campaigns. We had to make it feel natural, credible and relevant to people here.

We wanted the brand to have messaging that sounds natural, pages that answer the buyer's real questions, and local proof that makes the product easier to try.

That also changed how we looked at the category.

We didn't need to convince people to go vegan. We needed to show why the product makes sense on an ordinary day: when you want something quick, tasty, nutritious, easy to prepare and more balanced than what you'd grab on the go.

What we changed

We started with the things that shape the decision before someone taps “buy”.

We rewrote the key messages so the product was explained more clearly and more naturally for the Romanian market.

We worked on the product pages so people understood faster what they were buying, why they'd need it and what made it relevant to them.

We changed how the product was presented visually, so it didn't feel cold or generic, but closer to the buyer's real life.

We built ads from scratch for the Romanian audience — not adaptations of material designed for other markets.

We brought local creators and Romanian testimonials into the communication, because in a new market trust isn't built from the brand's claims alone. It's also built through real people who can say: “yes, I tried it, it makes sense, it's good.”

Then we tested constantly: messages, visuals, audiences, angles and content formats.

We didn't treat marketing as a campaign you set up and let run. We treated it as a system that has to be watched, understood and adjusted.

The results and what they mean

The first changes showed quickly.

In January 2025, out of every 100 people who visited the site, roughly 1 bought. The following month, after we'd worked on the message, the pages, the ads and local trust, that number passed 3 buyers out of 100.

More precisely, the conversion rate rose from 1.32% to 3.72% in month two. The best month reached 4.16%.

For an online store, that matters enormously. From the same traffic, more people end up buying. The ads work harder. The budget is used more efficiently. Growth no longer depends only on constantly bringing new people to the site.

Over the year, the results started to settle in.

• —In Q2, the site stayed stable at roughly 2.7–3.1 buyers per 100 visitors.
• —In Q3, revenue grew 45.3% over Q2, and campaigns hit their best quarterly ROAS: 3.63x.
• —In September, stock-outs blocked campaigns for almost the entire month.
• —In October, once stock was back, the conversion rate climbed again to 3.97%.
• —In Q4, revenue was 44.3% higher than in Q1.
• —And in January 2026, revenue was almost 10 times higher than in January 2025, with +186% sessions and +558% completed orders.

This is where you see most clearly what a growth strategy means.

You look at where the path from interest to purchase breaks, fix that point, test, adjust and scale what starts to work.

For Oh!Good, growth didn't come from ads alone. It came from the messaging, the pages, the local content and the campaigns starting to work together.

That's how the same traffic started bringing in more buyers.

What the client says

What you can take from this project

A good product doesn't sell itself.

People need to understand quickly what they're buying, why it fits them and why they can trust it enough to try it.

In Oh!Good's case, growth started with a closer look at the buyer's path: what they see, what they understand, where they hesitate and what convinces them.

That's what a good growth strategy does. It doesn't come with a preset recipe. It looks at the business, the data and how people behave, then acts where change can produce the biggest impact.

For Oh!Good, the critical point was trust. For another business it might be the offer, the website, the message, the price, the ads, the stock or the lack of a clear direction.

The question stays the same:

where does the buyer get lost before buying?

That's where real growth begins.