Zager Guitars
$300K → $1.5M/month, 5x revenue scale.
Zager Guitars sells premium acoustic guitars direct-to-consumer, founded by Denny Zager, a lifelong musician with a devoted player base. When we engaged, the brand was running a steady but plateaued paid program around $300K/month in revenue with no clear path to scale.
What was broken.
Premium DTC guitars sit in an awkward spot for paid media: the consideration cycle is long, the AOV is high enough to demand a confident click, and the buyer base is enthusiast-narrow rather than mass-market. Zager's existing program was profitable but stuck, incremental budget wasn't producing incremental revenue, and Performance Max was eating brand-search credit instead of finding net-new buyers.
We needed to scale a 5x revenue lift without breaking the margin economics that made the brand fundable in the first place.
The plays we ran.
Margin-aware ROAS targeting set per product tier, not a blended number
Built a 90-asset Performance Max campaign with full creative variation across hooks, formats, and audiences
Segmented Shopping by promotability, different bid posture for hero SKUs vs. long-tail catalog
Brand-exclusion in Performance Max so it stopped cannibalizing organic and brand-search revenue
YouTube discovery layer for top-funnel, pulled new buyers in without overpaying for the bottom
Continuous creative testing cadence so the asset library stayed fresh as audiences saturated
The numbers.
Monthly revenue scaled from roughly $300K to $1.5M, a 5x lift, at a blended 8.4 ROAS. The mix shifted: more first-time buyers, less reliance on brand-search demand the company was already capturing organically.
The scaled program holds its ROAS at higher spend, which is the harder problem in DTC paid media.
“They really are experts in their field of digital marketing. Moreover, their team possesses a rare old-fashioned work ethic and drive to get the job done that I've rarely experienced before.”
Engagement is ongoing. Roadmap includes deeper YouTube investment and a Meta-side test of the same margin-aware ROAS framework.
Want a similar result for your account?
Get a 47-point written audit. Five business days. No sales call.
