Halcyon N°07.
Independent Scottish distillery, zero brand recognition, 2,000 bottles of a 7-year single malt to move before the next cashflow gate. Paid social seeded the awareness, retargeting closed the sale. Sold out in 21 days, blended ROAS 6.8×.
- Client
- Independent Scottish distillery
- Period
- 3 weeks active launch
- Channels
- Meta · TikTok · Retargeting
- Spend managed
- £24k total
The problem.
Two thousand numbered bottles, £82 retail, no existing email list, no influencer network, no PR budget. Whisky category is dominated by 60-year-old established names with eight-figure marketing budgets. The founders had three weeks of working capital and one shot at the launch.
Brief: "Sell out the run before we have to mortgage anything else. We've got £24k to spend on paid."
Fig. 01 — The product. We had three weeks to convince 2,000 strangers it was worth £82.
What we did.
Cold launches with limited stock are a different game from ongoing accounts. You can't optimise — there's no learning phase. So we did everything pre-launch and bought the right kind of attention at the right moment.
- Pre-launch (week −2) · £3k of TikTok seeded to whisky enthusiast creators, soft tease, no product shown
- Pre-launch (week −1) · Meta "interest list" campaign, 8 creative variants, audience: spirits + premium goods + collectors, single CTA: "Get notified"
- Launch day · email blast to 4,200 collected emails (32% open rate) — sold 380 bottles in the first 90 minutes
- Launch week · Meta + TikTok scaled to interest list lookalikes, blended ROAS 8.2×
- Closeout · retargeting only, urgency creative ("47 bottles left"), scarcity working as designed
- Creative · 30 variants total, mostly product-led, no founder talking-head, no story garnish
The channel mix.
Meta carried the conversion, TikTok the awareness. We deliberately under-spent on retargeting until the last week — once stock was visibly running out, retargeting became the cheapest channel because the urgency was real.
Execution.
The pre-launch list was the whole trick. Once we had 4,200 warm emails, the launch wasn't actually paid acquisition any more — it was conversion. The paid budget mostly went into building that list in the two weeks before stock dropped.
- Pre-launch spend · £14k of £24k went into list-building, not direct sales
- Launch spend · £10k of paid to amplify, plus organic + the email list
- Closeout · retargeting only, last 240 bottles cleared with £1.8k of spend
"We thought we were paying for ads. They built us an email list and a launch system. The N°08 release sold out faster than N°07, with half the spend. That's not media buying. That's compounding."Founder & Distiller — Independent distillery