— Case Study
HAXE Fitness · Fitness Equipment · Meta Ads
Building an acquisition engine in one of the most competitive categories in DTC
HAXE came to us with a great product — the Slam Pad, a tire replacement for sledgehammer training — and no digital presence. We built the acquisition engine from the ground up. In the last nine months, revenue is up 124%.
+124%
Revenue growth
(last 9 months)
-46%
Customer acquisition
cost
+11%
Conversion
rate
— The Short Version
HAXE entered fitness DTC with a great product and no digital presence. We built the acquisition engine from scratch.
- Established CAC targets and financial guardrails
- Built a structured creative testing framework
- Launched and scaled Meta as the primary acquisition channel
- Ongoing landing page recommendations and email flows
+124%
Revenue growth
-46%
Customer acquisition cost
+11%
Conversion rate
$2K→$15K
Monthly ad spend
— The Challenge
Breaking into fitness DTC without an audience or a playbook.
Fitness is one of the hardest categories in DTC. You're competing against established brands with large budgets, a fitness audience that's constantly advertised to, and a product discovery problem — most people don't know a Slam Pad exists until they see one.
HAXE had a genuinely differentiated product in Grady's Slam Pad, and Grady himself as a credible, on-brand face for the company. What they didn't have was a digital acquisition system, a tested creative approach, or a clear picture of what a profitable customer looked like financially.
The job wasn't to optimise an existing channel. It was to build the whole thing — strategy, structure, creative, and financial model — from scratch.
Highly competitive category
Fitness DTC is saturated. Large incumbents dominate ad auctions, CPMs are high, and standing out requires a creative strategy that earns attention — not just pays for it.
01
No existing acquisition infrastructure
No ad accounts, no pixel data, no audience history, no email list. Every system needed to be built from the ground up before we could start generating meaningful data.
02
Unknown financial guardrails
Without clear CAC targets and contribution margin data, there was no way to know how aggressively to scale — or when spending more would start hurting rather than helping the business.
03
Post-click leakage
Paid traffic is wasted if the landing page doesn't convert. With no prior data on what messaging resonated, conversion rate needed to be built and iterated alongside the ad strategy.
04
— What We Did
Built the foundation first. Then scaled.
We don't start with spend — we start with the numbers that tell us what profitable growth actually looks like. Once those were established for HAXE, we built the creative and acquisition systems around them.
01
Financial Clarity
Established CAC targets and scaling guardrails
Worked with Grady to model the business economics — contribution margin, maximum viable CAC, and target return thresholds. These numbers became the anchor for every scaling decision we made. Instead of chasing ROAS, we had a clear financial picture of what growth needed to look like to be sustainable.
02
Creative Strategy
Built a creative testing framework around Grady and UGC
Fitness is won or lost on creative. We built a structured testing framework — a clear roadmap for what to create, how to test it, and how to act on the results — with Grady as the face of the brand. UGC-style content featuring Grady in action proved to be the standout format, combining authenticity with product demonstration in a way polished ads couldn't match.
03
Meta Acquisition
Launched and iterated Meta campaigns as the primary growth channel
Meta became the core new customer acquisition engine. With a structured testing cadence, we could identify winning creative quickly and scale it confidently within the financial guardrails we'd established. Over two years, this compounding system has driven the majority of HAXE's revenue growth.
04
CRO
Ongoing landing page recommendations to match ad messaging
We treat the landing page as part of the campaign, not separate from it. On an ongoing basis, we make specific recommendations to align page messaging with what's working in the ads — reducing the friction between click and purchase. This ongoing CRO work has contributed to an 11% improvement in conversion rate.
05
Retention
Implemented email sequences to capture abandons and collect social proof
We built a set of automated email sequences to recapture visitors who browsed but didn't buy, and to collect reviews and social proof from customers post-purchase. These sequences capture incremental revenue at near-zero acquisition cost and feed the creative engine with real customer language.
— The Outcome
124% revenue growth. CAC down nearly half.
+124%
Revenue growth in 9 months
From $2K to $15K in monthly ad spend, with revenue growing proportionally faster than budget — the hallmark of a system that's getting more efficient as it scales, not less.
−46%
Growth Diagnostic
We audit your ad accounts, funnel, and unit economics. You get a written breakdown of where the real constraint is — and what to do about it. Whether we work together or not.
+11%
Conversion rate improvement
$2K → $15K
Monthly ad spend growth
2 yrs
Active partnership
Meta
Primary acquisition channel
"
Vanspec didn't just run our ads — they helped us understand our business. Having a clear picture of what a profitable customer actually costs changed how we think about growth. The results since have spoken for themselves.
G
Grady
Co-Founder, HAXE Fitness
— Key Takeaway —
In a crowded category, creative that earns attention beats creative that just buys it.
Fitness DTC is expensive to enter precisely because everyone is spending. The brands that win are the ones with a systematic creative process — testing formats, angles, and messaging with discipline until they find what actually resonates. For HAXE, that meant putting Grady and real product use front and centre, and building a framework to test and scale what worked.