Real engagement · The Stack System · 2022–2023

A specialty DTC fitness product, 245% YoY revenue growth.

A 12-month fractional engagement with The Stack System, an award-winning golf-speed-training product co-developed with PING and a leading biomechanist. Paid social and paid search built into a primary revenue channel, plus an influencer partnership engineered for evergreen returns.

245%

YoY revenue growth through paid social and paid search acquisition

Named client engagement, published with the consent of the client. Specific revenue figures aggregated for confidentiality; growth multiples and ROAS ranges reflect actual results.

The starting situation

An award-winning niche DTC product, ready to scale

Company: The Stack System — an award-winning golf-speed-training product co-developed with PING's VP of Performance and golf's leading biomechanist. Real product credibility, real product-market fit with serious golfers.

The constraint: Niche product, defensible technology, devoted early customer base — but the acquisition motion to scale beyond that base hadn't been built. Paid social had been tested; conversion rates were inconsistent; influencer partnerships were ad-hoc rather than systematized.

What Treetop was asked to own: Customer acquisition. Paid social, paid search, creative testing, conversion optimization, and a systematized influencer partnership program.

What we built

The acquisition system

Paid social architecture (Meta)

Top-of-funnel + retargeting blended campaigns. Disciplined separation of prospecting and retargeting audiences; creative tailored to funnel stage rather than reused across.
Aggressive creative testing. Continuous variant testing across video, image, copy hooks, and product positioning. The wins compounded — most months had at least one new creative that outperformed the prior champion.
Result: 20–36x ROAS on Meta ads (blended across top-of-funnel and retargeting). For a specialty DTC product with a strong product story, this is the upper end of what's achievable.

Paid search

Branded + non-branded coverage. Defensive on branded; aggressive on category and competitor terms.
Landing page conversion optimization. The product story translated to paid-search landing pages — different surface, same conversion discipline.

Influencer partnership program

Pitched via Instagram DM, negotiated to evergreen contract. A single high-leverage influencer partnership that featured an evergreen content collaboration with product placement.
200% ROI in 9 months. The structure (evergreen content + affiliate sales) means the partnership continues generating returns long after the initial contract period.
Repeatable framework. Influencer outreach methodology, partnership terms, and creative collaboration model documented for future expansion of the program.

What we'd tell you about this pattern

What worked, what this means for your stage

What worked

Specialty product + disciplined paid acquisition + influencer leverage. The combination ROAS ceiling for this product category was meaningfully higher than for commodity DTC — but only with creative discipline and audience separation. Most DTC operators leave 30-50% of achievable ROAS on the table by running blended campaigns instead of stage-separated ones.
Influencer partnership as evergreen asset, not one-time spend. Most influencer deals are structured as one-time content drops. Structuring as evergreen with affiliate-sales tail produces dramatically better long-term ROI — and dramatically fewer relationships to manage.
Creative testing as a discipline, not an event. The 20–36x ROAS range didn't show up in week one. It showed up in month 6 after continuous creative iteration. Operators who give up on paid social after 90 days of "it's not working" usually quit right before the creative system starts producing.

If you're a specialty DTC product

This pattern — fractional growth leadership applied specifically to paid social + paid search + influencer-as-evergreen — fits specialty DTC products with real product credibility, defensible positioning, and a devoted early customer base. The leverage is in disciplined acquisition systems, not just spending more on ads. If your ROAS ceiling feels stuck, the answer is usually creative + audience architecture, not budget.