CASE STUDY
Growth Using Facebook Value-Based Lookalike Audiences
How blend helped Brentwood Associates move two of its portfolio companies, Soft Surroundings and J.McLaughlin, beyond traditional catalog sales and into a paid social strategy built on first-party data and value-based audience signals.
THEIR STORY
Building category leaders takes more than capital.
Brentwood Associates is a Los Angeles-based private equity firm managing over $2.4 billion in assets. They work directly alongside the leadership teams of their portfolio companies, bringing operational depth and strategic direction to help each brand reach its category potential.
When two of their fashion retail brands hit a ceiling on customer acquisition, Brentwood recognised that the problem was not the product. It was the media strategy.
Blend isn't just an agency out to spend our marketing dollars. They want to know the bottom-line impact. The audience-centric approach and precise media strategy we built together lifted both brand awareness and lead generation efficiency in categories where every dollar needs to earn its place.
THE CHALLENGE
Great Customers. No System to Find More of Them
Soft Surroundings and J.McLaughlin had each built strong, loyal customer bases through decades of traditional retail: catalogues, direct mail, and in-store. The challenge was not the quality of those customer relationships. It was the cost and pace of building new ones.
Both brands needed a scalable paid media approach to acquire customers who resembled their best existing buyers, and to do it at a return that made growth genuinely profitable.
THE SOLUTION
First-Party Data, Put to Work on Facebook
Blend worked alongside Brentwood Associates to build a Facebook-first paid social strategy for each portfolio brand, grounded in their existing customer data rather than broad demographic targeting.
Soft Surroundings
Soft Surroundings had historically relied on print catalogue distribution to drive new customer acquisition. blend introduced Facebook as a primary digital acquisition channel and built the strategy around the brand's existing first-party data.
Built a value-based custom audience from the brand's highest-value existing customers, then created lookalike audiences calibrated to match that purchase profile.
Used Facebook automatic placements to serve ads across its full family of apps and surfaces, capturing the strongest-performing inventory in real time.
Steadily increased ad spend on the top-performing audiences as results compounded.
Measured digital ROAS directly against the cost-per-acquisition baseline set by traditional catalogue distribution to make the business case clear.
J.McLaughlin
Blend repositioned J.McLaughlin's advertising strategy around a digital-first approach, with Facebook value-based audiences at the centre of paid acquisition.
Built a custom audience of existing customers with individual lifetime value scores assigned, giving the algorithm a precise signal of what a high-value buyer looks like.
Constructed a layered system of lookalike audiences from the LTV-weighted base.
Scaled investment methodically into top-performing audiences week over week, compounding returns rather than spreading budget across untested segments.
Getting The Most For Their Money
40%
Higher ROAS for Soft Surroundings versus traditional catalog acquisition
76%
Higher ROAS for J.McLaughlin via Facebook lookalike audiences
2 portfolio brands
Scaled through the same first-party data playbook
