Gnarly Nutrition

Aaron Santanello on the record: 102% new-customer growth year over year

Recorded 24 November 2025, in the middle of Black Friday week. Unscripted, in full. The transcript is on this site.

Where they started

Gnarly Nutrition makes sports nutrition. The brand was born in the climbing community in Utah, and the people who tried it stayed.

Aaron Santanello joined as marketing director in 2025. He inherited a business that had been trading for twelve years and had stopped growing.

The ad reports looked fine. About 80% of revenue came from people who had already bought, and the ads kept paying to reach them again.

Gnarly had also raised $5M and earmarked it for marketing. By October 2025 the plan was to spend it over about sixteen months and scale the brand.

Three or four months into the job, Aaron asked three agencies to audit the Meta and Google accounts. We were one of them.

What the audit found

We audited the Meta and Google accounts before there was a contract or a fee. Aaron remembers it as a twenty-plus page research document.

The findings run to five pages. Behind them sit four appendices: a 42-page page-speed report, a competitor analysis, and two organic search reports.

All three agencies found the same problems. What Aaron bought was the part that came after the problems.

The core finding fits in one sentence. Paid media was buying revenue the brand would have earned anyway, and starving the acquisition that would have grown it.

The same four numbers, three months apart

What we did, in order

1. 11 August 2025First call. Aaron sends access to Google Ads, Shopify and Polar the same afternoon.
2. 15 August 2025We deliver the audit and walk it through for 73 minutes. No contract, no fee.
3. 26 August 2025Gnarly picks us out of the agency field. The contract is signed the next day.
4. 14 September 2025The previous partner's notice ends. We take the accounts.
5. September 2025Existing customers excluded from most of the spend. Google split into brand and non-brand. Meta rebuilt around the five best-selling product groups.
6. October 2025Triple Whale and a post-purchase survey go in, so the counting stops depending on the ad platforms.
7. 5 November 2025The Gnar Pack launches: $20 of best sellers for $5. New-customer volume moves in the same week.
8. 24 November 2025Aaron records the client interview, in the middle of Black Friday week.
9. January 2026The board resets break-even from about $900,000 a month to about $350,000, and cost cutting starts.
10. First quarter 2026We run the five numbers against the $5M plan. Contribution margin after ads is minus 86%. A new customer costs $138 and is worth about $79 in ninety days. Payback is eight months. The verdict is do not scale.
11. April 2026Spend is cut rather than raised, from $43,281 to $14,449 in a month. Cost per new customer almost halves.
12. 9 July 2026Aaron tells us June was the company's first profitable month, and that $145,000 went into the bank.

What happened

The first thing to move was not revenue. It was what a new customer cost.

In the eight months before we took the accounts, a new Gnarly customer cost between $124 and $236 to buy, against about $85 of ninety-day value. Every new customer lost money for at least three months.

The Gnar Pack changed the front end in November 2025. A $5 entry offer pulled the cost of a new customer to $102 for the month, and new customers made up 43% of revenue, the highest reading in the whole series.

The real change came in April 2026, when spend was cut instead of raised. Cost per new customer fell to $84, then $51 in May. For the first time in the series a new customer was worth more in ninety days than it cost to buy.

The five numbers, and what they said

Every HoloGrowth account runs the same card each week. Five numbers, thresholds set per brand, and a rule for what to do with the answer.

On Gnarly in the first quarter of 2026 the card read: contribution margin after ads minus 86%, a new customer costing $138 against about $79 of ninety-day value, and payback at eight months against a thirty-day bar.

That is not a marginal call. Spending $5M into that arithmetic would not have scaled the brand. It would have scaled the losses, with investor money, faster.

What the business became

On 9 July 2026 Aaron told us June had been the company's first profitable month, and that $145,000 had gone into the bank that month. That is a cash figure from Gnarly's books, across every channel, and we have not audited it.

Our own contribution margin, counted after all marketing costs rather than ads alone, was still negative in June. The fixed marketing costs are large against current revenue, and closing that is the next job. Both readings are here because both are true.

What is not in dispute is the direction of the unit economics. In the eight months before we took the accounts, a new customer cost between $124 and $236 against about $85 of ninety-day value. In May 2026 a new customer cost $51.

In May 2026 Aaron asked us for talking points for his board. He wrote his own summary of the position: a solid foundation to grow the brand profitably, and likely the first time Gnarly had been in that position looking at historical data.

What we got wrong

Revenue has not grown. In the first eight months of 2026 the tracked DTC series is down about 12% on the same months of 2025, on about 40% less ad spend. Part of that is the deliberate cut, and part of it is a store that still converts badly.

We graded the site in the first audit. GTmetrix put performance at 50% and the page took 35 seconds to load fully. By October we were telling them page speed graded E on most pages and was likely costing 20 to 30% of conversion. We kept buying traffic for a store we had already failed, and the new site did not go live until 20 May 2026.

New-customer share still sits near 30%, and the cost of a new customer drifted back to $97 in August 2026 as spend crept up. That is the bill for running at a third of the old budget, and it is the next thing on the list.

What you can take from this

Verify this case study

• Aaron Santanello's on-camera figures come from the recorded interview above, published 18 December 2025. The full transcript is on this site.
• Every result number comes from Gnarly Nutrition - Performance Reporting, the sheet we share with the client, created 2 September 2025 and read on 8 September 2026. Its net sales column is one-time DTC only, so it excludes subscriptions, wholesale and Amazon. Every chart says which columns it uses.
• The audit pages are the document sent to Aaron on 15 August 2025, rendered from the file. The findings are quoted verbatim, and the GTmetrix report is page one of its appendix.
• The two slides are from our Foxwell Founders session, How Hard Can You Actually Scale, delivered 21 July 2026 with Gnarly named on screen. The cash figure and the first-profitable-month line are Aaron's own, from calls on 9 and 23 July 2026.
• See the ads themselves in the Meta Ad Library.
• Numbers on this page last updated 2026-09-08. Ask for a reference on your Strategy Call.