Case Study · Kutzall Tools
4x Growth in 90 Days. Then a $143K Black Friday.
Kutzall Tools was doing $15K a month on Shopify. Ninety days after we took over, the channel had 4x'd, profitably. Then Black Friday weekend beat the brand's all-time record by more than half.
A one-year engagement on the Shopify side of an established tool brand, starting March 2025.
The Starting Point
An Established Brand With an Underworked Channel
Kutzall makes carving and shaping tools with a loyal following of woodworkers and makers. The product and the audience were never the problem.
The Shopify channel was. It sat around $15K a month while Amazon carried the business. Paid traffic was not pulling its weight, and there was no clear view of which marketing dollars were actually acquiring new customers profitably.
One scope note, because honesty is the point of these pages: we ran the Shopify side only. Amazon stayed in-house and held steady throughout, so the growth below is not channel-shifting. It is new demand.
What We Changed
Same Playbook, Different Levers
Like every engagement, it started with the math: P&L tracking, plus an extra tracking layer built specifically to see new-customer acquisition clearly. Then five moves did the work:
- Rebuilt the opt-in before scaling traffic. The basic 10%-off popup became a full-screen, question-first micro-commit flow. Opt-in rates went from a couple percent to around 6% at peak, so every visitor the ads bought was also feeding the email list.
- Rebuilt the Google Ads engine. New Shopping campaigns, Performance Max, clean tracking, an optimized product feed in Merchant Center, and strict segmentation between brand protection and new-customer acquisition. Then we scaled it.
- Took over Meta and fed it creative. The account came to us underperforming at roughly breakeven. We ran a simple Advantage+ structure and solved the real problem: volume. Five to ten new ads went in every week.
- Built a creator whitelisting pipeline. Kutzall's community of woodworkers and carvers was already making content. We built a system to request whitelisting access, collect content and post IDs, and run partnership ads straight from creators' pages. Meta ROAS climbed from about 1 to about 4 in a matter of weeks.
- Stayed in the room. A weekly call with the brand's social team kept the creative pipeline and the ad account moving as one system.
The through line is the same one on every page of this site: most agencies manage platforms, we help improve the business.
The Crown Jewel
The $143K Weekend That Was Supposed to Be $90K
Kutzall's best-ever Black Friday, back in the COVID boom, was around $90K. Recent years ran $60K to $70K. The owner's stretch goal for 2025: hit $90K again.
The weekend was won in the weeks before it. The opt-in was switched to a sale-focused version early, so the email list filled with people waiting for the deal. Email and SMS campaigns carried the offer through the whole stretch.
Then, from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, we surge-scaled the ads: budgets pushed up by the hour when performance ran hot, pulled back when efficiency dipped. Somebody was actually watching the account all weekend, holidays included. That somebody was us, and here is the honest reason why: our pay was a percentage of the sales. When the agency only wins if the weekend wins, nobody is at the dinner table ignoring the ad account. That is what aligned incentives actually look like in practice.
The weekend closed at $143K. Nearly 60% over the goal, and more than half again the brand's all-time record.
In His Own Words
Hear It From Mike
North Track took us from $15K/month to 4x growth in 90 days, profitably. We even hit six figures in five days! If you've been disappointed by agencies before, they're the real deal.
Questions
About This Case Study
What did North Track Digital do for Kutzall?
We ran the Shopify side of the business for a year: P&L and new-customer tracking, a rebuilt opt-in that roughly tripled email capture, a rebuilt Google Ads engine with Shopping, Performance Max, and brand protection, and later Meta ads powered by a creator whitelisting system feeding five to ten new ads a week.
How did the $143K Black Friday weekend happen?
Preparation and attention. The email list was primed for weeks with a sale-focused opt-in, email and SMS campaigns ran through the weekend, and ad budgets were surge-scaled by the hour based on live performance, from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. The goal was $90K. The weekend closed at $143K.
What is surge scaling?
Adjusting ad budgets up or down by the hour during a high-traffic event, based on live performance instead of set-and-forget budgets. When the numbers ran hot we pushed spend up. When efficiency dipped we pulled back. It requires actually watching the account through the weekend, which we did.
Did this include Amazon?
No. Kutzall's Amazon channel stayed in-house and held steady through the engagement, though it likely saw some lift from the demand the Shopify-side marketing created. The results on this page come from the Shopify side we ran.
More Results
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