Nail Alliance
How Nail Alliance Achieved 4.04x ROAS in the UK Market
Google Ads
In this case study
About the Brand
The Challenge
The Strategy
The Execution
Results Dashboard
Creative Showcase
About the Brand
A premium nail-care portfolio operating across two continents.
Nail Alliance manages five distinct brands across professional and consumer markets, trading across owned DTC stores and Amazon, in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Each brand has its own positioning, customer base, and creative voice.
01 – Gelish
FLAGSHIP
Premium soak-off gel polish. Salon professional and consumer.
02 – Morgan Taylor
SISTER BRAND
Lacquer line, paired with Gelish in the UK market.
03 – RCM
DIY GEL KITS
Red Carpet Manicure. At-home gel manicure systems.
04 – Entity
PRO TOOLS
Professional-grade nail systems for salon use.
05 – Artistic
NAIL ART
Creative finishes, art-led product line.
The Challenge
Five brands. Two markets. No room for shortcuts.
Multi-brand DTC at this scale isn’t a single problem. It’s a series of problems that compound. Each brand needs its own audience, its own creative voice, and its own commercial rhythm. Get the architecture wrong and you spend twice for half the return.
01 – Five distinct brand identities, no creative dilution
Gelish, Morgan Taylor, RCM, Entity and Artistic each speak to different audiences. Asset libraries, tone, music, all separate. Sharing creative across brands would have meant losing what makes each one work.
02 – Two markets, one underlying performance language
US and UK programmes run on different platforms, different stockists, different consumer behaviour. Reporting needed to roll up to a portfolio view while keeping each market’s economics legible.
03 – DTC plus Amazon, attribution that doesn’t bleed
Owned stores and Amazon Seller Central pull from the same media but report differently. Without a clean stack, every signal gets double-counted or misattributed.
The Strategy
Portfolio Mix Architecture: one engine, five voices.
We built an operating model that treats Nail Alliance as a portfolio, not a single account. Each brand gets its own asset library and channel calibration. The portfolio gets a unified reporting view that lets us reallocate budget weekly between brands based on marginal return, not last quarter’s plan.
BRAND-LEVEL
Asset and voice integrity
Distinct creative libraries per brand. Brand-specific music, models, palettes. No cross-pollination of asset between Gelish and Morgan Taylor, even when they share retail real estate.
PORTFOLIO-LEVEL
Budget reallocation engine
Weekly reporting roll-up across all 5 brands × 2 markets. Budget shifts to brands and channels with marginal return, not legacy allocations.
CHANNEL-LEVEL
Compound media stack
Paid social, search, Amazon, affiliate and influencer running on the same campaign calendar, with attribution clean enough to know which one earned each sale.
The Execution
Meta Ads
Two channels, calibrated brand by brand.
Meta carries the brand-build and discovery load. Google captures intent, especially for Gelish where brand search demand is strong. Each brand gets its own campaign architecture, its own creative refresh cadence, and its own ROAS guardrails.
META
Discovery and brand-build
- Brand-specific creative libraries per market
- Spring/Summer/Autumn/ Winter collection campaigns
- AdRoll layered for retargeting
- Peak per-ad ROAS sustained above 7x on hero creative
Intent capture
- Performance Max per brand, per market
- Search asset groups built around brand and product collection terms
- 100% new-customer focus on Google account
- Branded search demand strongest for Gelish UK
Amazon
a second storefront, not a side channel.
Amazon Seller Central is treated as a first-class commerce surface, not an afterthought. Hero SKUs are positioned, bundled and promoted with the same creative discipline as the DTC site. Amazon-specific ads ladder into the broader Meta funnel rather than running in isolation.
The Amazon line carries a different commercial logic from DTC. Customer acquisition cost is lower, brand discovery is higher, and repeat purchase data lives outside our owned CRM. We treat that as a tradeoff to design for, not a problem to wish away.
RCM’s Amazon Bundles ad alone is currently sustaining a ROAS above 4.7x. Reach extends well beyond what the brand could buy on owned channels for the equivalent share-of-voice.
AMAZON SIGNAL
RCM Amazon Bundles Ad
4.7x SUSTAINED ROAS
100% BUNDLE FOCUS
Paid finds the audience. Influencer makes them care. Affiliate closes the loop.
12M IMPRESSIONS
Red Carpet Manicure campaign
6.4M REACH
Same campaign, paid amplification
2.5M+ AFFILIATE VIEWS
Single creator partnership, one fortnight
100K+ ORGANIC IG VIEWS
Per reel, sustained across recent runs
Results Dashboard
Sustained performance, expanding reach, falling acquisition cost.
4.04x PEAK PORTFOLIO ROAS
February 2026 · blended across brands
7.9x BEST PER-AD ROAS
Gelish TOF Awareness · May 2026
5 BRANDS LIVE
Across US and UK markets
12M+ CAMPAIGN IMPRESSIONS
Single influencer activation
+130% NTB GROWTH
Magento new accounts, Sep to Nov
−38% CAC REDUCTION
Gelish UK, 6-month trajectory
DTC beauty Meta benchmark typically lands at 2.5x to 4x ROAS. Nail Alliance has sustained the upper end of that range across a portfolio of five distinct brands across two markets simultaneously.
Acquiring more customers, more efficiently, every month.
Across the engagement, the portfolio has driven steady monthly growth in new-to-brand (NTB) customers while reducing the per-customer cost of acquiring them. This is the hardest thing to do in DTC growth marketing. Most programmes do one or the other.
The mechanism is portfolio-level budget reallocation. As one brand’s marginal customer cost creeps up, we shift budget toward whichever brand or channel is currently the most efficient acquirer, then return when the picture changes.
GELISH UK · NEW CUSTOMERS PER MONTH
Three things this work reinforced for our wider practice.
01 Multi-brand portfolios reward operational discipline, not cleverness.
The unlock here was not a single bright idea. It was a system that keeps five brand identities clean while running them under one budgetary brain. Replicable, not magical.
02 Amazon belongs in the strategy from day one, not as an add-on.
DTC and Amazon work as complementary surfaces when planned together. Bolt-on Amazon programmes end up cannibalising rather than expanding.
03 Compound channels beat optimised channels.
Paid plus affiliate plus influencer running on a shared calendar drives outcomes no single channel produces alone. The reach we see at portfolio level is not the sum of channel parts.
Creative Showcase
Brand voices, kept distinct.
A snapshot of recent hero creative across the portfolio. Each ad ladders to its own brand’s voice and visual language, while sitting in the same operational system underneath.
Keep it Juicy
Collection campaign · 5.72x ROAS
TOF Awareness
Top-of-funnel hero · 7.9x ROAS
Floral Wonderland
Seasonal launch creative
Amazon Bundles
Cross-channel · 4.7x ROAS
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