OutsideIn
Building a DTC streetwear brand from £300k to over £1M as the first full-time hire.
OutsideIn had a product people cared about and a mission that mattered. Every purchase provided a giving item for someone experiencing homelessness. The mission resonated. The products attracted attention. But revenue sat around £300k, generated through events and organic social. I joined as the first full-time hire to build the infrastructure that could turn traction into scale.
Role
Marketing
Company
OutsideIn
Website
weareoi.com ↗
Challenge
OutsideIn was a mission-driven brand with real traction. But traction doesn't scale without systems.
Revenue hovered around £300k annually, almost entirely from events and organic social media. Event-based revenue is unpredictable. Organic doesn't scale on command. And the founders were maxed out doing everything manually.
The brand had visibility in Belfast. What it didn't have was the infrastructure to grow beyond the founders' personal networks. No paid marketing channels. No email automation. No systematic way to launch collections. No performance marketing strategy.
Online revenue sat at £13-16k per month with conversion rates under 1%. The website existed, but it wasn't built to convert at scale. Collections launched without coordinated strategy. Marketing happened when there was time, not because there was a system.
The question wasn't 'does this brand have potential?' It was 'how do we build the infrastructure to make growth repeatable instead of random?'
Goal
To scale a DTC brand, we needed to build revenue infrastructure from scratch. Not just run ads. Build systems.
Paid acquisition channels needed building from the ground-up. Facebook and Google Ads that could profitably acquire customers at scale. Testing frameworks to learn what worked. Attribution systems to understand where revenue actually came from.
Email marketing needed to become infrastructure, not afterthought. Automated flows that converted browsers into buyers without manual intervention. Welcome sequences, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase engagement. Systems that worked while we focused elsewhere.
Collections needed a launch playbook. Pre-launch hype building, coordinated paid and organic push, email sequences timed to momentum peaks. Every launch following a process we'd tested and refined, not hoping each one worked differently.
Content production needed systematising. Photoshoots managed. Influencer partnerships coordinated. Assets created that worked across paid ads, social, email, and website. Every piece of content earning its place in the revenue system.
And the brand needed visibility beyond events. OutsideIn needed to become impossible to miss, not just at pop-ups but everywhere in the market we served.
Result
This wasn't about running some ads. It was building the complete infrastructure that lets a DTC brand scale predictably.
Revenue grew from £300k to over £1M. Online revenue scaled 4x to £800k+ with peak months hitting £200k. But the numbers only show part of what changed.
We built paid acquisition channels that worked profitably. Facebook Ads maintaining 6-10x ROAS through systematic testing and optimisation. Google Ads launching and scaling alongside. Performance marketing that turned spend into predictable revenue.
Email infrastructure generated returns over 100x investment. Peak months hit 131x ROI because we built flows that converted automatically. Welcome sequences, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase engagement. Email became the most profitable channel by treating it like infrastructure.
Collections launched systematically. Colour Collection. Hope Sweet Hope. Varsity Collection. Women Collection. Stranger Made Someone. Essentials. Each following the playbook we'd built. Pre-launch momentum, coordinated push across channels, email sequences driving conversion. Made launches predictable instead of hoping.
Conversion rates climbed from under 1% to peaks of 6.87%. The website became a conversion machine, not just a catalogue. Customers didn't just browse, they bought.
And we made the brand visible. OutsideIn went from niche startup to everywhere in Belfast. The beanie hats became the signal. The brand became impossible to miss. The mission became the movement.
