Winners take all: Cracking the code of ecommerce in 2025

In 2025, the divide between digital retail winners and losers isn’t just widening – it’s becoming a chasm. Brands are feeling this in real time, in their results, and in the pressure to evolve or fall behind.

So how are the winners winning?

We uncovered the answers at our latest event, where ecommerce leaders and ambitious brands came together to share growth hacks, insights, and disruptive scaling strategies.

Here’s a look at what went down, what we learned, and the key takeaways shaping ecommerce success in 2025.

The full-funnel framework behind LeMieux’s 212% growth

LeMieux’s transformation from a wholesale-heavy business to a thriving global ecommerce brand didn’t happen overnight. The shift required moving beyond a reliance on performance-driven, bottom-of-funnel tactics to a full-funnel, cross-channel strategy.

At first, rapid investment in performance marketing delivered short-term wins in new customer acquisition. However, the costs quickly mounted, and LeMieux soon realised that this wasn’t growing the brand as a whole but rather shifting customers from wholesale to DTC at a high expense. Sustainable growth isn’t just about capturing immediate demand but expanding the market by reaching future customers before they’re ready to buy, or adopting the 95:5 rule.

Shaun Loughlin explained that “if you want to grow you have to spend at least a portion of your marketing budget advertising to people who aren’t ready to buy yet – if you only ever target people who are in market ready to buy, you will eventually hit a ceiling”.

With Nest’s help, LeMieux transitioned to a full funnel digital marketing approach. Shaun emphasised the need for patience with this approach, citing Fospha’s data which shows that brands investing in upper-funnel for 10+ months saw a 35% lower CAC, 11% lower cost per point, and 45% higher ROAS. In contrast, those investing for just 3 months faced a 33% higher CAC, 14% higher cost per point, and 7% lower ROAS.

So, by focusing on long-term investment in upper-funnel marketing and ensuring accurate attribution beyond click-based models, the business saw impressive results, achieving a 212% growth rate over three years and creating a halo effect across all sales channels. 

Sean also cautioned that for this strategy, creative is not to be underestimated. As competition for attention increases, creative assets must be compelling and emotionally resonant, – “dull ads need to have five times as much spend behind them as non dull ads – that’s ads that trigger an emotional response”. They also need to be produced at scale.

Speaking of creative…

George Wiscombe, our Creative Director and head of Nest Studio shared our secret sauce for tackling creative challenges. One of the largest hurdles today is balancing creative ambition with limited budgets. Creative investment ranges from budget-friendly, repurposed content to high-production campaigns, and finding the right balance is crucial. Many brands struggle to allocate more than a small percentage (George suggested around 2%) of their media budget to creative, leading them to borrow from other teams, repurpose existing assets, or lean on influencer-generated content. After spending some of that budget on designers and strategists, you’re probably left with around 1%.

However, the key to high-performing paid social creative isn’t just about spending more, it’s about being strategic with resources. That’s why George and his team take on the challenge of helping brands operate efficiently within that 1%.

Through research, collaboration, and hands-on testing, George shared how Nest has identified an untapped network of charismatic micro-creators – individuals who may not have large followings but can produce engaging, authentic content tailored for performance marketing. By providing clear creative guardrails and structured briefs, Nest has developed a scalable approach that delivers impactful paid social content without excessive production costs. 

Beyond the hype: How AI is fundamentally changing marketing

AI is advancing at a relentless pace, with new capabilities emerging daily. But beyond the hype cycle, what does it really mean for businesses? 

According to Ankur Shah, advisor at Nest, the impact of AI today is as transformative as the rise of social media in the 2000s – fundamentally reshaping the way businesses operate and marketing is executed. Unlike traditional software, AI models are lateral thinkers, process vast data, and generate insights at speed. For ecommerce brands AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a necessity for giving you the edge in a saturated market. Winning brands are those that can harness AI’s strengths – speed, scale, and reasoning – without losing the strategic insight that only human marketers can provide. 

At Nest, this belief has driven the creation of Hummingbird, our AI-powered platform built to give clients the edge in digital marketing. Hummingbird operates as a co-pilot, analysing campaign performance, predicting creative fatigue, benchmarking against retail industry trends, and making real-time optimisation recommendations. This isn’t about replacing human marketers but giving them “computational superpowers” as Ankur puts it, freeing up strategic thinkers to focus on high-impact decisions while AI handles the complexity of campaign management. AI is also reshaping the creative process itself, allowing brands to produce and test more assets at scale than ever before.  

The smartest teams don’t just look at data

Winning in ecommerce today requires a balance between data, intuition, and adaptability – a theme echoed throughout the panel discussion with marketing leaders from Mint Velvet, AllSaints, and N Brown Group. Measurement was a core focus, with speakers agreeing that while robust analytics are crucial, over-reliance on data can slow decision-making. “It often costs more to measure something than the benefit you’ll get from the insight,” noted Sam Walker from N Brown Group, emphasising the need to blend structured measurement with gut instinct. Similarly, Mint Velvet’s Maddy Turley highlighted the importance of defining success on your own terms, rather than defaulting to finance-driven ROAS targets.

“I tell finance what the ROAS target should be”

she said, underscoring the power of understanding unit economics and channel performance to justify investment in upper-funnel marketing.

Beyond measurement, business alignment and team structure were identified as critical success factors. Jay Safdar from AllSaints emphasised the need for shared objectives across brand, performance, and finance teams to avoid internal competition. “Brand and acquisition shouldn’t be fighting for budget, they should be working towards business outcomes,” he explained. Establishing cross-functional relationships and aligning teams around a single strategy helps eliminate friction and drive efficiency.

Creative strategy also played a major role, with the panel agreeing that brands need to move beyond hyper-optimised media tactics and invest in storytelling at scale. As Jay put it, “The biggest leaps in performance will come from creative, not just media optimisation.”

Swyft – Kill your scared cows

As a brand that relies on one-time, high-consideration purchases, Swyft faced a fundamental challenge: how to build a profitable, sustainable business without the cushion of high repeat purchase rates. Keiran Hewkin, CEO & Co-founder of Swyft, openly admits that they got a lot wrong – especially when they went too deep into performance marketing, ignoring the bigger picture. But their biggest mistake? Holding onto “sacred cows”- internal beliefs about what would drive success, like assuming in-house manufacturing was a strategic advantage or that next-day delivery was a must. It took near-crisis moments for them to question these assumptions and rethink everything from their unit economics to their retail strategy – “don’t let crisis go to waste”.

One of Swyft’s boldest moves was going against their finance and marketing teams’ predictions and launching retail partnerships. Despite warnings that stores would cannibalise online sales, they found that having a local retail presence actually drove incremental online growth in those regions. Similarly, rather than relying on spreadsheets to dictate strategy, they started getting out of the office and – with permission – literally sitting in customers’ homes, learning what actually mattered to them. This really highlighted to Kieran that the business mustn’t assume they know what their customers care about, and to just go and ask them. 

Winning with brand – lessons from full-funnel leaders 

A standout theme from this panel was how ecommerce brands can begin transitioning to a full-funnel strategy, blending upper-funnel brand building with performance marketing, without the need for multimillion-pound TV budgets. The speakers were aligned in the belief that brand is no longer optional, especially as growth from lower-funnel tactics plateaus. As Jacob Booty from Nadine Merabi put it, “Performance only gets you so far. To 2x or 3x the business, we had to take brand seriously, and that meant starting with our North Star.” This meant defining the brand’s values, customer, and purpose so that every layer of creative could reflect that strategy.

Erin Mackness of CASETiFY echoed this sentiment, describing how “brand is a relationship, performance is a transaction, so you’ve got to close the gap between the two.” She emphasised the need to show up consistently in the communities where your customer already is – whether through community events, influencer partnerships, or PR. Sam Carter of Fospha offered practical advice around measurement, warning against relying on last-click or user-level tracking and advocating instead for a “leap of faith” backed by directional data and consistent testing. He shared compelling benchmarks: brands spending 10%+ on upper-funnel activity were seeing double the ROAS and half the CAC compared to those who weren’t. 

The decisions that fuelled True Classic’s explosive global growth

We rounded off the day with a fireside chat with True Classic’s President Adam Eisenstadt to lift the lid on their strategy, explaining how the US D2C upstart became an international contender.

The company’s global push began in 2022, leveraging platforms like Global-e to simplify international logistics, taxes, and currency localisation. This move, combined with aggressive media investment, led to an almost 10x growth in international sales within a year. 

However, rapid expansion brought challenges, different regions had vastly different customer behaviors, return rates, and cost structures. Instead of applying a blanket strategy, True Classic dug into the data, optimising ad spend, pricing, and creative on a country-by-country basis.

Beyond operational efficiency, brand resonance was a major growth driver. True Classic found success with humorous, bold creatives – often unconventional, but always memorable. To Sean’s earlier point, Adam concurred that “The cost of being dull is real.” They saw first-hand how entertaining, culturally relevant ads drove higher engagement and long-term brand recall.

Their next frontier is deep localisation – not just tweaking ad copy, but building region-specific brand narratives to unlock new levels of international growth.

Adam wrapped up by drilling home the importance of speed. When geopolitical uncertainty threatened their supply chain, they moved fast. Anticipating potential trade disruptions, they reduced their reliance on China as a vendor from 70% to 10% in just four months, saving millions when tariffs hit. When Mexico imposed an unexpected import ban on apparel, they rerouted $10M worth of stock, secured a new US warehouse contract, and began shipping orders all within 90 days.

Their approach is 95% execution, 5% strategy. While long-term planning has its place, True Classic’s success proves that acting with urgency and adaptability is often the difference between maintaining momentum and falling behind.