Everything that must exist before the first euro of spend

A skincare brand launching direct-to-consumer while already selling through an established retail network. The brief was not a campaign. It was building the operating structure a D2C business needs before the first euro of media spend.

A brand with existing retail distribution cannot simply switch on an online store and start advertising. The two channels compete for the same buyer, and the online one is the newcomer. Most of the decisions that determine whether the launch works are commercial, and they have to be made and owned by the business before anyone writes an ad.

Built and ran the launch register across six workstreams: technical site and staging access, the measurement stack, the strategic decisions the client had to own, brand and product assets, D2C operations, and the commercial targets. Each item had an owner and a status, so the launch stopped depending on who remembered what.

The measurement stack covered GA4, Tag Manager, Search Console, Merchant Center and Meta Business Manager. Operations covered fulfilment, payments, customer support and returns.

Online pricing against the retail network. A direct channel that undercuts your retail partners destroys the relationship that carries most of your volume, and no amount of media efficiency compensates for that. Alongside it: which part of the portfolio goes online at all, how the launch is communicated to the partners already selling the brand, margin per category so target CAC could be calculated rather than guessed, a staged performance requirement by month instead of one number, and a promotional calendar aligned with the retail calendar so the two channels stopped cannibalising each other.

One rule applied throughout: no budget spent until the critical GA4 events were validated in preview and deduplicated against the platform conversion tag.