# Case Study: What Three Skincare Brands Found When They Stopped Reading One Blended Number | Crank Source: https://wearecrank.com/case-studies/is-clinical-revitalash-deesse-pro Three years of creative testing and cohort separation across RevitaLash, iS Clinical and Deesse PRO — including the result that didn't confirm what the first two brands seemed to prove. --- Beauty & Skincare Case Study — RevitaLash, iS Clinical, Deesse PRO # What Three Skincare Brands Found When They Stopped Reading One Blended Number Three years of creative testing and cohort separation across RevitaLash, iS Clinical and Deesse PRO — including the result that didn't confirm what the first two brands seemed to prove. Challenge Three skincare brands could see a single blended return on every account, which meant every decision about creative, budget and audience was being made without knowing whether it was reaching new customers or reselling to existing ones. Approach Built cohort separation into reporting and bidding, then used the identical seasonal campaigns each brand already ran to test creative format and audience warmth as controlled, same-week comparisons across all three brands at once. Outcome Retention now returns roughly one and a half to three times what acquisition returns across every brand and market measured — and 2025 revenue grew 38–79% while blended return fell, which the separation shows is the growth working, not a decline. 01 ## Three brands, one blended number RevitaLash, iS Clinical and Deesse PRO run through the same group and, until recently, the same measurement: one return on spend, in the same account, that no strategic decision could see behind. When the 2024 audit checked, it found no separation between new and existing customers at any of the three — a single figure was doing the work of two very different questions. Creative told the same story. Across a seasonal event, each brand's Meta campaigns ran a single headline, description and image — nothing to test. Their Google campaigns, running proper text-ad variation and shopping data, beat the industry return benchmark by fifty to a hundred per cent over the same week. The gap between the two platforms, same brands, same week, was the cleanest evidence available that creative volume on its own moves return substantially — and it was only visible because Google happened to be run differently, not because anyone had set out to test it. 02 ## Building the separation Cohort classification went in first — the plumbing that lets a return be reported and bid on separately for a new customer and an existing one. Two of the three brands had it running by 2026\. Creative moved onto a deliberate testing footing: user-generated content run head-to-head against standard branded creative, as five same-week comparisons across the three brands rather than a single brand's before-and-after. The comparisons were built to be genuinely comparable — same seasonal event, same platform, same period — so a result could be attributed to the creative itself rather than to timing, audience or offer moving underneath it. 03 ## What the separation showed User-generated content beat standard creative in all five comparisons: at RevitaLash 2.8 against 2.5 on existing customers and 1.0 against 0.5 on prospecting; at iS Clinical 1.9 against 0.6 and 1.4 against 1.0; at Deesse PRO 2.3 against 0.4 on prospecting. Five comparisons across three independent brands moving in the same direction is far stronger evidence than any one brand's preference. Once the split existed, retention and acquisition stopped hiding inside each other. Eighteen months after the audit found no separation possible, retention was returning 5.25 against 4.03 on acquisition at one brand and 6.10 against 3.73 at the other — cost of a new customer £25.42 and £31.84 respectively. Widened across a second brand and three markets, the pattern repeated: 8.6 against 3.4, then 6.0 against 1.0, 5.6 against 1.7, and 3.2 against 1.0\. At iS Clinical alone in the first quarter of 2026, existing customers returned 10.06 times spend and produced eighty per cent of the channel's revenue on Meta, against 3.70 for prospecting. 04 ## Where the obvious answer would have been wrong The pattern from the seasonal test — UGC wins — was tested again over the festive period and the following quarter. It won again at two of the three brands: 81 per cent better at RevitaLash, 37 per cent better at Deesse PRO. At iS Clinical it lost, decisively, twice: standard creative returned 3.42 against 0.84 in the festive period and 7.83 against 1.05 the quarter after. The exception was also barely funded — one UGC advert with no offer behind it, then three videos on £196 of spend — which is itself part of the finding: a format cannot be judged on a test too small to produce an answer, and a group-level decision taken from two brands' results would have been wrong for the third. Click price told a similarly unreliable story. Comparing UGC against standard creative across the same three brands in the same period, the click cost moved in every direction — up 102 per cent at RevitaLash, up 436 per cent at iS Clinical, down 51 per cent at Deesse PRO — and acquisition cost did not follow it consistently: down 48 per cent, up 305 per cent, down 34 per cent respectively. A doubled click price produced a halved cost per customer at one brand and a quadrupled one at another, in the same group, in the same weeks. 05 ## What growth actually costs Across the 2025 calendar year, RevitaLash grew revenue 38 per cent to £1.91 million on 75 per cent more spend; iS Clinical grew revenue 79 per cent to £960,000 on 122 per cent more spend. Blended return on spend fell at both — 21 and 19 per cent, to 4.22 and 4.51\. The account reviews set out why rather than treating it as unexplained: at RevitaLash, Meta conversion rate moved from 5.0 to 4.0 per cent as more prospecting campaigns ran to bring in new customers, while Google click costs rose 43 per cent under competitive discounting pressure. Paid media rose from 48 to 67 per cent of total revenue at one brand and 51 to 77 at the other. Read on the blended figure alone, both years would look like a decline. Read against the separation the group now has, they are a growth strategy working as intended — acquisition returns a fraction of what retention returns, so any deliberate shift toward winning new customers pulls the blend down arithmetically without anything having got worse. What the account reviews are honest about, still: understanding what those new customers are worth over time remains an open action at both brands, three years on. The mechanism is evidenced. The eventual return on the acquired cohort is not yet measured. ## Three years, three brands, and the finding that didn't repeat everywhere 8.6x vs 3.4x Retention vs. acquisition return 5 of 5 UGC beat standard creative, same-week tests +38% / +79% 2025 revenue growth, RevitaLash / iS Clinical 3 years Since the audit — customer lifetime value still unmeasured Figures drawn from Crank's own managed-account data and account reviews for RevitaLash, iS Clinical and Deesse PRO, 2023–2026\. 2025 figures verified against the reporting database. ## Want to know what this looks like in your own account? These findings came from asking straightforward questions before any budget moved. We're happy to do the same for yours. [ Talk to Wearecrank](https://wa.me/447457416922?text=Help%20my%20business)[Get in touch](/contact) [← Back to all case studies](/case-studies)