Lords & Labradors
Founded in 2013 in the UK, Lords & Labradors designs and handcrafts premium pet products — including their iconic Chesterfield beds — in their specialist British workshop. Today, they serve loyal customers across 17 countries worldwide.
- Paid Social
- Paid Search
- CRM
Snapshot: The UK's leading premium pet brand, unlocked
Growth Shop was brought in to transform Lords & Labradors’ retention and acquisition infrastructure — rebuilding CRM from the ground up, launching SMS as a full channel, and restructuring paid media across Google and Meta.
The focus was activating the rich first-party data the brand was already collecting — pet names, breeds, birthdays — and turning it into a revenue engine. Within eight months, SMS grew 570x, CRM revenue jumped 74% YoY, and the brand reached the top 2% of Klaviyo customers globally.
Problem: Scaling without a a clear data infrastructure
Lords & Labradors is one of those rare brands that doesn’t need to explain what it stands for. Handcrafted dog beds manufactured in their own facility. Luxury accessories designed for owners who treat their pets like family. A product range trusted by Tesco and John Lewis. And more than £5million in annual DTC revenue built largely on word-of-mouth and organic search — over half of all sessions arriving without a single pound of ad spend. In a category full of commodity sellers and dropshippers, Lords & Labradors had built something genuinely difficult to replicate: a premium brand with deep product-market fit and a customer base that kept coming back.
That’s what made the opportunity so striking. A brand this strong, with this much organic demand and this much customer loyalty, was barely scratching the surface of what its growth channels could deliver. Paid media was running without structure. CRM — for a brand sitting on a goldmine of first- party data — was contributing just 6% of total revenue against an industry benchmark of 15–25%. And some of the richest customer data in UK ecommerce — pet names, breeds, birthdays, purchase history — was sitting completely unused in Klaviyo.
Lords & Labradors wasn’t underperforming because the brand was weak. It was underperforming because the infrastructure hadn’t caught up to the brand. The gap between what this business was doing and what it could do was enormous.
When we ran the GS IQ diagnostic in May 2025, the scale of the untapped opportunity became clear. This brand didn’t need a fix. It was a brand that needed to be unlocked. Start with CRM. Lords & Labradors captures something most DTC brands would kill for: rich, intent-laden first-party data at the point of signup.
Pet names, breeds, birthdays, product preferences. In a category with natural replenishment cycles — beds wear out, treats run low, puppies grow into new sizes — that data is a retention engine waiting to happen. But none of it was being activated. There were no post-purchase flows. No lifecycle tiering. No structured winback sequences. SMS existed in four automated flows with 242 subscribers and zero campaign strategy.
The eCRM scorecard came back with scores of 3 out of 10 across engagement, segmentation, personalisation, and revenue impact. Email open rates were strong — this audience genuinely wanted to hear from the brand — but click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue per recipient all lagged Klaviyo benchmarks by 50–83%.
Personalisation: Pet Names, Breeds, Birthdays. Huge opportunity for activation.
- The audience was there. The intent was there. The infrastructure to convert it into revenue wasn’t.
With this clarity, the path to scale was clear.
On paid media, the same pattern held
Strong underlying demand, underserved by structure. Meta’s account scored 4 out of 10 on structure and 3 out of 10 on creative performance during the Audit. The algorithm had quietly drifted toward serving ads to existing customers rather than acquiring new ones. On Google, nine separate Performance Max campaigns competed against each other with maximisation bid strategies, fragmented product targeting, and insufficient conversion volume. The entire search programme for a £5 million DTC brand consisted of one brand campaign with three keywords and one DSA campaign returning 0.5x ROAS. Customer acquisition cost had risen 78% year-over-year because the account structure was working against itself.
What made Lords & Labradors so compelling was the size of the gap between the brand’s strength and its channel execution. Great product. Loyal customers. Strong organic demand. Rich first-party data. And almost none of it was being leveraged by the growth infrastructure. Every lever was undertouched.
570x Growth. How?
Growth Shop started where the leverage was greatest: retention. The logic was simple. Lords & Labradors already had the customers, the data, and the demand. Every element of a world-class CRM operation was already in place except the operation itself. The job wasn’t to build something from nothing. It was to activate what was already there.
Growth Shop rebuilt CRM from the ground up. Lifecycle-based segmentation replaced the flat, one-size-fits-all approach. Post-purchase nurture flows went live for the first time — built around the pet data the brand was already collecting but never using. Abandonment sequences were restructured with urgency and personalisation. And SMS was launched as a full channel: automated flows, campaign strategy, and an aggressive list growth programme that would take the subscriber base from 242 to over 138,000.
In parallel, the paid media accounts were restructured to match.
- On Google, nine fragmented Performance Max campaigns were consolidated. Bid strategies shifted from pure maximisation to target-ROAS.
- Conversion tracking was fixed.
- Customer lists were uploaded for audience signals. An actual search programme was built for the first time
- On Meta, the account was reoriented toward new customer acquisition. Creative testing moved toward organic-feeling, dog-focused content —real dogs in real beds, product shots that felt like editorial rather than advertising
Total monthly media spend almost doubled, with Google absorbing the majority of the increase as Performance Max was properly consolidated and search was built out.
Top 2% in Eight Months
August 2025 — the first full month after the restructure — delivered £500K in net sales. It was the strongest non-November month in the brand’s history. But the real transformation was in CRM — the channel that had been the biggest opportunity from day one. YoY total CRM revenue grew 74%. Email click volume surged 294%. And SMS — which had been a near-zero channel eight months earlier — grew revenue 329% year-over-year.
The Infrastructure The Brand Deserved
By early 2026, Lords & Labradors had reached the top 2% of all Klaviyo customers globally for attributed revenue. The CRM operation had sent over 25 million emails in 2025 and generated 44million total interactions. Eighty-nine percent of CRM-attributed customers had joined the list after the Growth Shop partnership began. That audience wasn’t inherited. It was built. By February 2026, net sales were up 13% year-over-year with net new customers increasing 11%.
The CRM platform was being migrated from Klaviyo to Attentive to unlock even more advanced SMS capabilities, with early results showing 550 net new SMS subscribers in just ten days.
- Net sales were up 13% year-over-year.
- The CRM operation had sent over 25 million emails in 2025 and generated 44million total interactions
- Customer lists were uploaded for audience signals. An actual search programme was built for the first time
- On Meta, the account was reoriented toward new customer acquisition. Creative testing moved toward organic-feeling, dog-focused content —real dogs in real beds, product shots that felt like editorial rather than advertising
Total monthly media spend almost doubled, with Google absorbing the majority of the increase as Performance Max was properly consolidated and search was built out.
The best opportunities in ecommerce aren’t distressed brands that need saving. They’re exceptional brands whose growth infrastructure hasn’t caught up to their potential.
Brands where the product is right, the customers are loyal, the organic demand is strong — and the channels that should be compounding that advantage are barely switched on.
The Growth Shop Magic
That was Lords & Labradors. A brand with everything it needed to be significantly bigger — the product-market fit, the first-party data, the customer loyalty — and a growth infrastructure that was leaving most of it on the table. The trajectory from a 3-out-of-10 CRM scorecard to the top 2% of Klaviyo’s global customer base in eight months tells you how much was sitting there, waiting to be activated. Some brands need to be built. This one just needed to be unlocked.
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