Maximilian Equestrian

Where they started

Maximilian Equestrian makes premium riding apparel for women, men, children and their horses. Alex Arroyo Baudet co-founded it, runs paid media himself, and his co-founder runs product and operations. On the first call, 11 July 2024, he put spend at about EUR 25K a month, 85% Meta and 15% Google. The ads were already working. The online store had done EUR 981,863 in 2023 and EUR 1.16M in the first eight months of 2024.

Two things bothered him. Google 'has had a very slow start', with product-feed and store-integration problems: 'it's just been a nightmare'. He knew it was almost entirely brand search, 'which I'm not happy at all about'. Six weeks later the agency was gone. A payment issue had stopped the ads and 'it ended up being like 48 hours without ads being active' before anyone noticed.

He was also a skeptic of agency talk. On 11 July he said: 'Everything we say now is purely words. There's no real proof to anything.' So instead of a pitch we wrote him a Growth Audit of both ad accounts, at no charge. That was the version we ran before the diagnostic became the paid, 14-day Profit Clarity Audit. He granted Meta access the same afternoon.

What the audit found

We wrote the Growth Audit on 17 July 2024 and walked Alex through it on a recorded 74-minute call the next morning. It covered the website, email, Meta and Google. The diagnosis in one line: both accounts were buying demand the brand already had and reporting it as growth. The two levers that create new demand, Google Shopping and Meta new-customer acquisition, were broken or switched off.

On Google, one broad 'branded' campaign mixed brand and non-brand terms, and every recent conversion in the Performance Max campaign was a branded query. Only 1% of its spend reached Shopping because of problems with the product feed. On Meta, a traffic campaign was optimising for landing-page views, the best-ROAS campaign was paused, and the Advantage+ campaign had no engaged or existing-customer audiences defined. So Meta was quietly remarketing to people who had already bought.

Alex held off in July. Six weeks later he had let the agency go and wrote that he was 'in talks with a couple of new ones'. He signed on 4 September 2024, for Meta and Google together. The bullets below are quoted from the audit document word for word, and the Google Ads and Meta Ads sections are shown as exported from the Google Doc.

What we did, in order

1. Jul 2024The Growth Audit, at no charge. Both accounts were buying demand the brand already had: Google on brand search, Meta on people who had already bought. Alex held off for now.
2. Sep 2024Signed 4 September, and Google rebuilt around non-brand search and Shopping. A new account, a new product feed on DataFeedWatch, and English and Spanish ad copy.
3. Oct 2024Alex sent proof on 1 October that a wholesale order was firing Meta's purchase pixel. We reconciled order by order the same day and back-tested it to a third of Meta's reported revenue across sampled days. Split out with a separate 'Purchase Only Wholesale' conversion on 10 October, so those orders left the reporting.
4. Oct-Nov 2024The wobble, then the turn. On 15 October non-brand Google still looked bad internally. By 29 October MER was up 56% on lower spend, with non-branded Google driving sales for the first time.
5. Aug 2025Wrote the scale, hold and cut rule before the Q4 push. Above a blended ROAS of 5 scale 10-20% a week, between 4 and 5 hold, below 4 cut.

What happened

Every figure on this page is whole-store, not attributed, and in EUR unless the screenshot says USD. The sources are Shopify Analytics, the weekly Performance Reporting sheet fed by Shopify, Meta and Google, and the YoY Growth document. We presented that document to Alex on the recorded 19 December 2025 call. Alex launched most of the Meta ads himself. The brand moved to Shopify Plus and ran its own email and launch calendar. An August 2025 riding jumpsuit became a bestseller on launch.

The first 90 days

The first 90 days are the cleanest read available. Before we started, the online store was already running +142.6% year on year. That is EUR 1,157,714 in January-August 2024 against EUR 477,210 in the same months of 2023, from the Performance Reporting sheet. Inside our first 90 days it held at +142%, on 64% more sessions and a conversion rate up 48%, while total sales including wholesale grew 103%. From 13 September to 11 December 2024, Shopify total sales were EUR 1,416,360. Non-brand Google produced sales for the first time in month two: on 29 October we reported MER up 56% on lower spend. Black Friday weekend 2024 did EUR 126,118 of revenue on EUR 10,542 of ad spend. The claim we will defend is the mix change, not the headline percentage. Our first four months of online-store revenue ran +281%, +143%, +121% and +207% year on year, on the online store alone.

The scale year

2025 was the scale year. From 1 January to 16 December, online sales went from EUR 2,281,657 to EUR 4,536,293 (+99%) while ad spend went from EUR 339,040 to EUR 925,631 (+173%). Google alone went from EUR 51,850 to EUR 233,444. The 16 December cut-off is the date of the YoY Growth document we presented on 19 December. On the full calendar year the online store did EUR 4,716,320 against EUR 2,460,489, which is +92%. The last two weeks are the December problems described below. From August 2025 the account ran on a written rule: scale only above a blended ROAS of 5, hold between 4 and 5, cut below 4. The rule existed so a falling MER could not quietly become falling profit.

November 2025 was the first seven-figure month: EUR 1,000,156.84 in Shopify total sales, up 36% on November 2024, with online sales up 67%. The 100% goal was not reached. In the final week Alex chose stability over a last budget push: 'I wouldn't touch Meta's budget anymore'. December was hard. The warehouse fell a week and a half behind after a three-week sale. A returns-app error was corrected in one batch of refunds on 22 December, and online growth slowed to +18.5% for the month.

What it cost

Online MER fell from 6.73 to 4.90 while ad spend rose 173%. Put the other way round, ads went from 14.9% of online sales to 20.4%. Lower efficiency for double the revenue was the plan, and whether that trade paid depends on contribution margin, which is the brand's number and not ours. We run every engagement on five numbers: CM3, nCAC, 90-day LTGP:CAC, payback, and the new-versus-returning split. Here, nCAC was tracked weekly against a EUR 70 threshold and the new-versus-returning split sat in the weekly report. The other three are the brand's internal accounting and stay with the brand. So does our fee.

What Google returned

Google spend going 4.5x is an input, so here is the output attached to it. This one is platform-reported rather than whole-store. Google's own reporting for 1 September to 5 October 2025 shows EUR 152,927 of conversion value on EUR 22,822 of spend, a 6.70 ROAS. Branded search took EUR 1,769 of that spend, 7.8%, against the handover rule of 10-15%. Non-brand Performance Max took EUR 19,685 and returned EUR 100,267, a 5.09 ROAS. It produced 301 of the 418 new customers Google recorded in those five weeks.

What the business became

Google was the channel Alex would not fund in July 2024. By 2025 it ran one Performance Max campaign per market, with branded search split into its own campaigns. The handover rule was that branded stays below 10-15% of account spend.

For Alex the change was what he could think with. He launched most of the ads himself, and two things changed how he decided. The written decision rule is what let the Q4 ramp, the largest spend block of the year, happen without a fresh argument every week. The separate B2B store, live on 6 June 2025, took wholesale off the DTC pixel for good. A fixed weekly hour with both media buyers, reporting by market, quarterly forecasts and a Google EMEA line came with the engagement.

The ending, plainly. On 16 December 2025 Alex gave notice to bring paid media in-house, with a new hire and AI tools, from 4 January 2026. He said on the final strategy call three days later that the decision had no relation to being dissatisfied with the work. Handover documents for both platforms went over in the first week of January. Twelve days before giving notice he left the review below on Trustpilot, two days after we sent him the profile link.

What you can take from this

Verify this case study

• The Growth Audit is a Google Doc created 17 July 2024, walked through on a recorded 74-minute call the next morning. Two of its sections are shown above as exported, and every bullet is quoted from it word for word.
• The Shopify screenshots come straight from the store: the first 90 days in EUR, and calendar 2025 vs 2024 in USD. The USD view is two crops of one screenshot, with a red box we added on the Online Store row.
• The EUR figures come from the YoY Growth document presented on the recorded 19 December 2025 call. The monthly and weekly series come from the Performance Reporting sheet, and the wholesale figures from our order-by-order reconciliation across sampled days in 2024.
• Alex's review is public on trustpilot.com/review/hologrowth.com and carries Trustpilot's 'Unprompted review' label. It did not come from an invitation email; we sent him the profile link on 2 December.
• See the ads themselves in the Meta Ad Library.
• Numbers on this page last updated 2026-09-08.