From $142K to $1M+/month
in 6 months
How Ads Mastery helped faith-based apparel brand He Would Love First scale revenue 7X through creative strategy, Meta ad optimization, and website CRO.
He Would Love First
He Would Love First is a mission-driven apparel brand built on a simple, powerful idea: the answer to "What Would Jesus Do?" is that He Would Love First. Founded by Casey Barlow Shultis, the brand has grown into one of the largest faith-based clothing companies in the U.S., trusted by over 700,000 customers and known for its premium tees, hoodies, crewnecks, NFC bracelets, and hats.
Every order ships with a free gospel bracelet, and every design carries a message of faith. With 17,000+ five-star reviews and a deeply loyal community, HWLF had already proven product-market fit. But by early 2025, growth had stalled. Returning customers kept the lights on, but the brand was struggling to acquire new buyers at scale.
A brand with massive potential stuck in a scaling plateau
When Casey came to Ads Mastery in May 2025, He Would Love First was doing roughly $142K/month — well below where the brand should have been given its audience size and product quality. The previous ad agency had been let go, daily ad spend had dropped from $5,000/day down to just $55/day, and new customer acquisition had fallen off a cliff. The brand was over-reliant on its 600,000-person email list, with returning customers making up the majority of revenue and only ~70 new email contacts being added per day (down from 400).
No Creative Volume
Ad fatigue was killing performance. No system for producing fresh creative at the pace Meta's algorithm demands.
No Creative Strategy
No differentiation between top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and retargeting creative. Every ad looked the same.
No Website CRO Plan
Conversion rate sat at 1.59% with no optimization roadmap. Traffic was coming in but not converting.
Too Many Returning, Not Enough New
The brand was cannibalizing its existing audience. No dedicated strategy for first-time customer acquisition.
High Break-Even ROAS
With a ~$48 AOV and 2.25X break-even ROAS, margins were tight and scaling felt risky.
No Promo Scaling Playbook
No plan for how to ramp spend before, during, and after sales events — including Black Friday.
A full-stack growth system built in 6 months
Ads Mastery assigned a dedicated coach (Jake Corriveau) to work with Casey weekly. From day one, the focus wasn't just "run better ads" — it was building the entire infrastructure for scalable, profitable growth.
Chase Chappell personally onboarded Casey, auditing every active campaign in the first session. Underperforming ad sets were cut, budgets were reallocated to the 3.55X ROAS spring sale campaign, and a retargeting campaign was built on the spot — targeting website visitors, Instagram engagers, and Facebook engagers. Projected ROAS jumped from 1.9X to 2.29X from budget adjustments alone.
The team built a structured testing engine: 5 unique interest-based audiences (including faith-adjacent interests like philanthropy, Taylor Swift, sororities, and university students), each with 5 ads. UGC content was prioritized. The target was 7–10 new creative pieces per week, rotated every 3 days to stay ahead of Meta's creative fatigue curve. Female-only targeting was implemented based on historical data, and the team focused ads on higher-ticket items while using bracelets as upsells.
Conversion rate optimization was layered in alongside the ad scaling. The team focused on aligning creative with landing pages, optimizing product pages for first-time visitors, and implementing bundle offers and quantity discounts to drive AOV higher. The conversion rate began climbing from 1.59% toward the 3%+ range.
The single retargeting ad set was expanded into a multi-layer system: 90-day purchasers with 7-day exclusions, full customer list uploads from Shopify, website visitor retargeting, and product-specific retargeting campaigns for tees, sweatshirts, and bracelets. Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns were introduced with top-performing creatives. Weekly spend scaled from $385/week to $16,000/week generating ~600 purchases. Canadian market expansion was also launched.
A dedicated Black Friday campaign was built with duplicates of the best-performing audiences and creatives, phased discounting (30% off early, 50% off peak week), interest stack targeting, and aggressive daily optimization. Daily ad spend reached ~$1,500/day. New creative batches were prepared in advance to prevent post-sale ad fatigue. Bundle offers and gift-themed promotions pushed AOV higher during the holiday window, helping HWLF cross the $1M/month mark from mid-November through mid-December 2025.
Ad examples from the scaled campaigns
The team implemented a diverse creative strategy across formats — UGC review-style ads, urgency-driven restock announcements, lifestyle video, and product showcase collages. Fresh creative was dropped every 3 days to combat fatigue.
From plateaued to unstoppable
In just 6 months, He Would Love First went from struggling to acquire new customers at $142K/month to crossing $1M+/month — while simultaneously improving efficiency across every key metric.
