Globe-Trotter

Ryan Vaughan, Head of E-commerce at Globe-Trotter, on three flat years and what changed

Ryan Vaughan, Head of E-commerce at Globe-Trotter, recorded 16 December 2025. Unscripted, published in full.

Where they started

Globe-Trotter has made suitcases in England since 1897. The company was bought by a consortium the day after lockdown, and the new money went where new money usually goes. They hired the biggest marketing agency they could find, then a smaller one.

Neither worked. The reports looked healthy because most of the return came from people who already knew the brand and searched its name. Ryan Vaughan, who runs e-commerce, put it plainly on camera two years later: "A lot of the time they were presenting ROI and it was mainly from brand. So we wasn't necessarily getting too much new business."

So they stopped. For roughly nine months Globe-Trotter ran no agency and, in Ryan's words, had "no marketing other than kind of four or five branded keywords." The US store was converting at 0.18%, and Ryan knew it: "I would love that website to be anywhere near zero point four percent. Would love it, love it." On the same call he said the thing that set the terms for everything after: "I never want to move agencies again."

His colleague Ed Walsh, then Global Head of Marketing, was blunt about which number mattered. "I'm not necessarily bothered about a ROAS number, because I think it doesn't really mean anything. And it certainly doesn't mean anything to our CFO in terms of how much money is in his bank account." The lead measure he named was new customers.

One thing to hold while reading the rest of this page. Globe-Trotter also sells through Harrods, through department stores in Japan and through stores in France. Every number here is the online business in the UK and US only.

What the first look found

Three things, and none of them was the budget.

The first was measurement. Tracking was missing roughly 30% of conversions, and a problem in the mobile funnel was suppressing the real blended return. Until both were fixed, every decision about spend would be made on a number that was wrong in an unknown direction.

The second was what the reported return actually contained. Branded search converts because the customer already decided. Google books it as a conversion, so an account can look profitable while new-customer acquisition sits still. That is what three level years look like from inside a dashboard.

The third only appeared when the account was split by market. Blended, Google was returning 1.22x. The UK account was at 2.30x. The US account was at 0.45x: it had spent £17,533 in the quarter, and Google could attribute £7,934 of value to it, from three conversions. A cost per conversion of £5,844.

What we did, in order

1. 1 November 2023First strategy call. Access to the Google accounts, a walk through what had been run before, and the brief: scale in their own time, profitably, without another burn.
2. Month oneNo budget change. The 30 days went on fixing tracking, the mobile funnel, a review of the email flows and a checklist for the website.
3. Still month oneOpened Performance Max, which the account had never run, and separated branded search from everything else so new-customer performance could be seen on its own.
4. That ChristmasRyan: "we had a great Christmas. It was one of the best Christmases that we had that year." Nothing had been added to the budget to produce it.
5. Through 2024Two weekly reporting sheets built and run, one per market, carrying spend, revenue, new customers, cost per new customer and blended return. They became the numbers the business was managed from.
6. Q1 2024The equivalent quarter, a year on. Spend up 93%, tracked conversion value up 387%, conversions up 419%, and the US account off the floor at 3.03x.
7. October 2024£20,738.56 across both accounts at 4.04x, on 41.96 conversions and £81,558.58 of Google-tracked value. An ordinary month with no seasonal event in it.
8. 19 December 2024Ed Walsh records the first client interview. The business has set a 40% e-commerce growth target and he says they are on track.
9. Q1 2025The US store's Shopify quarter lands at US$390,200 of total sales, up 59% on the same quarter a year earlier. Our own sheet reads +58.6% on the same window.
10. April to September 2025The step change shows up in the sheet: 1,099 new customers against 703 in the same months of 2024, and revenue up 38.8%.
11. 21 October 2025Quarterly review with Globe-Trotter and their private-equity owner. The US was running 15% below the prior year's spend with 30% more conversions, at 4.5x; the UK at 3.6x.
12. 16 December 2025Ryan records the interview at the top of this page.

What happened

The point of the first month was to make the next pound aimed at something real. Once tracking was honest and branded search was separated out, the account could be scaled against a return the finance side would accept rather than a number that flattered it.

What follows is the same two Google accounts, a year apart, on Google's own reporting. Nothing has been converted or restated. The date picker is visible in every screenshot.

A blended number hid an account that was losing money

In the before quarter the UK account returned 2.30x and the US account returned 0.45x. Averaged together they read 1.22x, a number that justifies neither cutting nor scaling. It is the number that keeps an account frozen.

A year later the two markets were within a tenth of each other, at 3.13x and 3.03x. The US was no longer a hole being covered by the UK.

Three conversions a quarter became sixty-two

The US account is the clearest read on the page. In the before quarter it recorded three conversions on £17,533 of spend. In the same quarter a year later it recorded 62.43 on £31,389, at £502.78 each.

Google counts fractional conversions because some are modelled rather than observed. Its numbers are left exactly as it reports them.

Spend nearly doubled. Tracked value went up nearly fivefold.

This is the trade the whole engagement was built to earn. Spend rose 93% because the return could carry it, not the other way round.

The table shows the mechanism, and it looks wrong at first glance. Reach went up enormously and the click-through rate fell, because Performance Max and Shopping buy a far wider audience than a handful of branded keywords. Every click on a branded keyword comes from someone who already knows you, so that rate was always going to look excellent and mean very little. The number that matters is at the bottom.

The first year rebuilt the engine. The second year is when it showed.

Google's figures are the platform's view of itself. This is ours: the two weekly sheets we built and ran, one per market, added together. New customers was the measure Ed Walsh named as the lead KPI on the first call, so it is the one plotted here.

The line is flat through 2023 and 2024, with the usual December spikes, and then steps up from April 2025 and stays up. Across April to September, 703 new customers became 1,099.

The revenue underneath it moved later than the account metrics did, and the table says so plainly. The first full calendar year did not grow. There is a section on that below.

The screenshots behind those numbers

If your blended return is hiding a market that loses money, that is findable in an afternoon. Apply for a Free Strategy Call

What the business became

Two named executives at the same company described the outcome on camera, a year apart, and neither was reading anything.

In December 2024 Ed Walsh said the business had set a 40% e-commerce growth target and was on track to hit it: "to grow 40% is quite phenomenal" in a luxury market "where people are seeing flat to no growth." He also described what he could see while doing it. "With the systems we set up, with Triple Whale and so on, I feel like I've got dashboards and everything at my disposal to be able to answer any questions from the CEO, the FD, in terms of what we're doing, how much we're spending, what the ROAS is, what the new customer is." That is the whole engagement in one sentence. A company Ryan describes as "run by a finance guy" will fund growth it can see.

A year later Ryan recorded the second interview. The prior fiscal year had been the step up; the one he was in the middle of was running 30% to 40% ahead again, while the rest of luxury was down.

Be clear about what those two numbers are. They are the clients' own growth figures for their own e-commerce channel on their own fiscal year, stated on camera. They are not ours and we cannot show you their books. What we can show you is on this page: the ad accounts, the Shopify quarter, and the reporting sheet we ran. That sheet, on calendar years and on total UK and US online revenue, tells a slower story than 40% two years running, and the section below says so.

What we got wrong

The first full calendar year did not grow. On the reporting sheet we ran, UK and US online revenue for 2024 came in 4.1% below 2023, and new customers were down 8%. The account economics were rebuilt in that year, and the payoff arrived in 2025, when new customers across April to September rose 56% and revenue rose 38.8%. Our sheet and the figures Ed and Ryan give on camera are not the same measurement: ours is UK plus US online revenue on calendar years, theirs is their e-commerce channel on their own fiscal year. We show ours because it is the one we can put a screenshot behind. A client paying every month is entitled to ask why the good year was the second one on our numbers, and we would rather put that on the page than average it away.

The relationship also narrowed. It started close, across e-commerce as well as paid media, and became paid media only. Ryan said so himself, unprompted, on camera: "I know that I should have leaned on you more. If I was to go back in time I probably would have leaned on you more." His e-commerce team had gone down to one person and he had no room to reach for anything extra. A partner who can see that happening should push, and we did not.

What you can take from this

Verify this case study

• Both interviews are published in full and unedited: Ryan Vaughan, Head of E-commerce, recorded 16 December 2025 and embedded at the top of this page, and Ed Walsh, Global Head of Marketing, recorded 19 December 2024 and linked above. Every spoken quote here is transcribed from one of those two recordings, or from the recorded first strategy call of 1 November 2023.
• The Google Ads figures come from three screenshots of the client's own account, reproduced from the deck we send to prospects. Each shows its own date picker: 28 December 2022 to 26 March 2023, 28 December 2023 to 26 March 2024, and 1 to 31 October 2024. Both account names are visible in all three.
• Conversion value in those screenshots is Google's own figure on Google's own attribution, and it includes brand searches. The Shopify panel and the monthly chart are the checks that do not come from an ad platform: the first is the store's own record, the second is the reporting sheet we built and shared with the client, which carries both markets month by month from January 2023 to September 2025.
• The two findings not readable from a screenshot, the roughly 30% tracking gap and the mobile funnel issue, come from Andrej's recorded account of the engagement, 2026-06-10, and are owner-confirmed.
• See the ads themselves in the Meta Ad Library.
• Numbers on this page last updated 2026-09-08. Globe-Trotter is a former client; ask on your Strategy Call and we will tell you exactly what is referenceable.