The Folio Society
Challenge
The Folio Society, an independent, employee-owned publisher known for its beautiful, illustrated books, had hard-won momentum. CEO Joanna Reynolds had rebuilt it for a new generation: a contemporary range of titles, a much younger readership, and a return to profit and growth, decades on from its origins as a members-only club.
What it hadn’t built was the right paid media strategy. When Nest took over, around 93% of spend sat at the bottom of the funnel, mostly search, harvesting existing demand. Folio had everything else: a premium product, healthy margins, a loyal following, and barely a direct competitor at its scale. But it was struggling to attract new customers, and the constraint was structural. The account also ran as one block, rather than localising by market, so even the US, its biggest market and its biggest opportunity, was running on a strategy built for the UK.
The timing made the opportunity bigger still. Readers are returning to physical books, and the most committed of them now gather in communities like BookTok, organised around the authors and genres they love. For an English-language publisher, the US is the largest book market in the world and has a long runway. Folio had the demand and the moment. What it needed was a way to scale into them.
Solution
Nest set out to do two things: build the full funnel Folio was missing, and run the US as a market in its own right. The CEO came from marketing, and her brief to Nest was to bring opportunities and push for them. That mandate made the bigger moves possible.
The build came first. For the first time, Nest created demand at the top of the funnel instead of only capturing it at the bottom, and the brake came off.
That allowed Nest to go after the US in earnest. Splitting the account into UK, US and Worldwide gave each market its own logic, and ranking every US state by purchases per 500,000 people showed where demand sat. California and New York stayed. Texas and Florida, heavy on raw orders but thin per capita, came out. In their place went 15 states a standard media plan would skip, among them Vermont, Maine and Colorado: the same reach, but with far more intent.
YouTube became the way in, run state-by-state. Instead of spreading budget thinly across the country, Nest concentrates a 10-to-14-day burst on a single state, backed by a bespoke brand film, then measures the lift before moving to the next.
Underpinning all of it is the creative. Most brands stretch one product across a dozen angles; Folio has hundreds of books, each with its own story and illustrations. The work runs on range: around 25 title-specific ads a fortnight, each built around a single book, with broad targeting letting Meta find the right reader for each title.
The strongest evidence that it was reaching the right readers came from a new edition of Dan Jones’s The Templars. Stocked to last at least a year, it sold out in 49 days, with paid social driving the majority of the sales.
A year into the partnership, the brand’s growth had recognition to match: The Folio Society was named Retailer of the Year at the 2025 eCommerce Awards.
What’s next
The next phase is creative-led, and few brands are better placed for it.
The plan is to go deeper into fandom. A typical account speaks to three or four audiences; Folio can credibly speak to ten or twelve, each genre and following addressed differently. From there, Nest will tailor the creative to the US, built around the cultural calendar that matters to American readers, and turn what works into a repeatable playbook. The creative stays human-made by choice: for readers who prize authenticity above almost anything, that’s the point.
Nest is already laying the groundwork to sustain it: sharper measurement and the creative capacity to keep feeding growth at this pace.
Folio has an enviable brand showcased by our books. Heritage yet dynamic, artisanal but always cutting edge, deep in today whilst not losing sight of what is important. Folio is unique. Nest understood this instinctively and worked with Folio to drive the business forward making it clear where the opportunities were and how to make the most of them. This has helped the continued growth of Folio, especially in the US. It has been great working with the Nest team
Joanna Reynolds
CEO at The Folio Society
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