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Scaling the UK’s fastest growing pet food brand with controlled media buying and creative volume.
From a standing start to 8 figures.
Rebuilt from the ground up — the growth engine that took Years from launch to category leader.
Years is on a mission to give dog parents more years with their dog.
Having launched its personalised nutrition offering via DTC subscription in 2023, the brand has shipped over 12 million meals through Shopify and has a growing retail presence including listings at more than 400+ Just For Pets stores nationwide.
Lifeblood has partnered with Years since 2023 — from pre-revenue through to the present day — supporting with media buying, growth consultancy and creative, and also winning a 2026 UK eCommerce Award for the work.
Here’s how we did it…
Rebuilding the growth engine.
Our approach was centered around 4 strategic pillars:
Improve measurement and increase experimentation to enable faster and more confident decision making
Develop a deep psychological understanding of the customer to improve personalisation and creative messaging
Increase creative volume, variation and velocity to maintain strong performance at scale on the brand’s primary acquisition channel, Meta
Explore top of funnel more purposefully and supplementary paid social channels in search of cost effective CPMs
Lifeblood worked closely with Fospha to run an MMM exercise, also measuring daily performance through a multi-touch methodology — allowing for an independent view of channel contribution.
As expected, impression-based channels in testing (Meta, Reddit & TikTok) were undervalued. TikTok was materially more incremental, contributing to 17% more conversions than reporting suggested. With Meta also driving branded search volume on Google Ads and organic sessions, alongside its own directly attributed conversions.
That paradigm shift changed the metric we optimised against. Rather than allocating budget on platform-reported nCPA, we set spend against incremental contribution and held the account to a blended efficiency target — which gave us the licence to fund the upper funnel that last-click attribution had been starving.
We paired that with a deeper testing cadence, and deliberately pushed testing beyond creative. In-platform, that meant audience exclusion tests (contrary to Meta best practice) to seize genuine incremental reach, geo holdouts to validate the MMM and bid strategy work moving to cost caps to defend nCPA through periods of softer seasonal demand in Q3, rather than conceding inefficiency and spend.
Beyond the platform, we ran conversion lift studies against bespoke breed-specific landing pages in order to test personalisation and the full customer journey.
Our creative strategist ran a Jobs To Be Done customer survey, reconciling each persona and audience segment with specific buying triggers, pain points, objections and purchase barriers — including mining the language and tone owners actually use in Reddit threads and forums, rather than the polished language brands assume they use.
That fed hooks and angles that did more than restate brand positioning with an offer attached. Each concept named a specific problem and framed Years as the obvious resolution, in the customer’s own vocabulary.
Andromeda rewards creative supply and diversity — the ranking system needs enough distinct signals to find the pockets of demand a media buyer can’t manually target into. So we scaled production to 100 assets per week: a mix of UGC and brand-led video shot in our studio, plus statics and 3D motion, each mapped to a persona and a funnel-stage.
Ad creative showcase.
Scroll down to explore the high-performing creatives produced to drive acquisition at scale across Meta and TikTok.
The results.
Over 12 months, the brand scaled media spend +325%, growing new customer numbers by 220% and maintaining a flat nCAC vs the previous year.
The future is bright for Years & Lifeblood’s partnership: the brand has launched a series of brand-building TV ads across Sky & Channel 4; a successful 400+ store retail roll out followed and Years has recently completed one of the biggest VC raises within pet in recent history through Verlinvest & Four Seasons Ventures.
The brand’s next growth lever will be internationalisation. Watch this space.
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