How We Sold $1,000,000 of Bikini’s in Winter
This week I invited Toby to talk about how they managed to sell $1,000,000 of bikini’s in winter. If you’re in fashion, or work at an agency that works with seasonal brands, this one’s for you.
Summer? Bikinis sell like free tacos at a music festival.
Winter? This resortwear brand’s sales were lost at sea.
The question? “How do we sell swimsuits when everyone’s ice-fishing in mittens?”
Here’s what we were working with.
A incredible product line.
A cult-like fanbase that tattoo’d their logo on their children (not really, but we’re having fun)
A new lightweight winter collection ready to slay.
But their strategy? A total dumpster fire.
Paid ads froze solid from October to March. Creative was as inspiring as Ashton Hall’s morning routine. And they had zero clue why their ads were tanking harder than a steel surfboard.
Our Maniacal Plan to Defrost Their Sales
We rolled up our sleeves. Honestly, it’s not hard to get girls to buy more stuff.
Basically, we did the work so the brand would stop throwing ad bucks into a black hole.
Step 1: CSI-Level Autopsy of the Flop
We didn’t just look at their data, we interrogated it with Triple Whale, Meta’s dashboard, and some savage creative benchmarking in Lens by Foreplay
This is what we were looking at.
CPMs in Q1 spiked 18–22% because let’s be honest, nobody cared.
Ads burned out faster than a tiki torch in a blizzard.
Landing pages converted like a snowball in hell (0.9% in winter vs. 1.7% in summer).
Hot take: The bikinis weren’t the issue. Their ads were screaming “Margaritaville” while customers were Googling “how to not become a popsicle.”
Step 2: A Creative Workflow That’d Make Picasso Jealous
Their old “strategy”? A chaotic Google Drive folder of “inspo” that looked like a Pinterest board after a tequila bender.
We yeeted that mess and unleashed Foreplay (not that kind, Karen) as our creative war machine.
Here’s the glow-up ✨
We used Foreplay’s Chrome extension to build a vault of ads, sorted by season (summer/winter), vibe (vacation, gifting, “I’m chic under 12 layers”) and format (Reels, carousels, statics).
No more throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, launching 100’s of ads and praying for a ROAS above 2. Just cold, hard data. What’s converting and why?.
Spyder for Stalker Mode:
We creeped on competitors’ ads like nosy neighbors.
Top brands weren’t selling the beach in winter.
They were pushing cozy, versatile, giftable energy.
We took that playbook and added spice.
We tagged everything like it was a Black Friday sale, “fluffy jacket,” “travel-ready,” “silent static.”
When an ad popped off, we knew why. When it flopped, we learned faster than you can say “next caller.”
Step 3: Turn Insights Into a Cash
I get it. You don’t care about CPM, you probably don’t even care about ROAS.
You want to sell stuff online.
We didn’t just make ads.
We made money printers.
Our briefs leaned into:
Contrasts (“Your puffy coat vs. our feather-light chic”).
Non-summer vibes (city commutes, holiday layering, “gift it to your bougie bestie”).
Social proof that screamed “stylish and functional, duh.”
It’s obvious, you should buy this.
One of our images ads had one product, a bold headline, and no text. It went from $100/day to $1,400/day with a 2.2x ROAS.
That’s $21,000 a week
Why? Foreplay showed us winter winners were clean, clear, and benefit-obsessed.
Step 4: Landing Pages That Don’t Suck
Their old pages were summer-coded disasters.
So we built a winter collection page that told customers this is a “cozy getaway”
We added a size and fit quiz to make shoppers feel like geniuses.
Swapped beachy pics for indoor, warm, “I’m living my best life” shots.
The Result
🚀 +69% YoY revenue growth (nice).
📦 Winter collection sold out by May. Before peak season even woke up.
💰 First April over $1M.
📉 CPA dropped 18%.
The TLDR:
This wasn’t about “more creative”.
It wasn’t even about more ad spend (we spent a lot less than we do in Summer)
It was about building a system that turned “ooh pretty” into sales.
Foreplay let us spot trends, tag winners, and brief like we were possessed by Don Draper
Now this system’s behind the growth of 8+ apparel Shopify brands. If your creative workflow looks like a Slack screenshot graveyard, burn it down.
Build a system that turns research into revenue.
We did. And this brand’s now selling bikinis in blizzards like it’s nobody’s business.
