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Avlskovgaard
On paper, the brand was generating real revenue. In the bank, there was almost nothing left.
That was the problem Advera inherited: nearly every krone Avlskovgaard earned was going straight back out the door into ad spend, leaving nothing behind for the things that keep a business alive — rent, payroll, the meat supplier. Within weeks of onboarding, the brand was staring down roughly 120,000 DKK in bills due in 14 days, had fallen behind with its meat supplier, and was on a Meta payment plan it couldn't keep up with. Then a 206,000 DKK VAT bill landed on top, split across three months but still demanding tens of thousands every cycle. At one point the founders described themselves as being up to their necks in it.
The marketing that was supposed to be the engine had also gone flat. Creative had hardened into a single repetitive format — hook, hard cut, repeat — and the messaging leaned on product specs ("no salt," "no sugar," "no fillers") instead of the thing pet owners actually care about: a dog that hadn't been himself lately, suddenly acting like himself again.
The deeper issue was structural. Avlskovgaard had been treating paid acquisition as the only lever it had. There was no retention engine, no recurring revenue, no cushion — so every soft day on Meta translated almost immediately into a cash crisis. A good product was being quietly strangled by the way it was being sold.
Avlskovgaard was a beloved Danish raw pet food brand running on empty — ad spend was outpacing revenue, bills to suppliers and Meta were piling up, and the business had no cushion left. Advera stepped in to rebuild the model from the ground up: shifting budget from costly cold acquisition toward retargeting and email, rewriting the creative to tell an emotional story instead of listing ingredients, and launching a subscription program almost from scratch. Within weeks the brand was back to daily profitability, and within months it had climbed to a 13% net margin with a fast-growing subscriber base and virtually zero churn — proof that the right strategy can turn a cash crisis into sustainable, recurring growth.
The first proof came almost immediately — and it came from spending less, not more.
Within the opening week, with spend pulled back and disciplined, the account was already profitable at a 3.22x ROAS — confirming what Advera had suspected: the unit economics worked fine. The problem had never been the product or even the ads. It was the reckless way budget was being deployed.
From there, the recovery compounded:
- Late April: the brand crossed into a break-even month overall, profitable on its good days for the first time in a while.
- Mid-May: average order value climbed to 359 DKK on strong days as bundling, gift tiers, and tasting packs took hold.
- Week 19: 83,000 DKK in weekly revenue, with profitability holding even while running a deliberately broad creative test to find new winners.
- Through June: the subscription program — built essentially from scratch — reached 23 active subscribers with zero cancellations, a clean, compounding base of recurring revenue the business simply hadn't had before.
- A 13% net margin, driven by the deliberate shift toward retargeting and email, a fast-growing subscription base— the clearest sign yet that retention had overtaken cold acquisition as the engine of the business.
The throughline matters more than any single number. A brand that had been one bad week away from not making payroll was now structurally healthier: less dependent on daily ad spend, increasingly carried by loyal repeat customers, and telling a story pet owners actually recognized.
The creative work
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