Multi-Channel Growth for cellhelmet, a D2C Device-Protection Brand

Phone accessories are one of the most brutally competitive retail categories there is; a challenger device-protection brand fights for the same screen-protector and case keywords as national players that outspend it many times over, on thin margins, across an owned storefront and a marketplace at once. Winning there is not a single-channel play. It is a system: a paid engine that buys intent efficiently, a catalog deep enough to fit every phone model, a storefront and a marketplace that reinforce each other, and a creative team fast enough to feed all of it through a relentless product cadence.

I ran that system as Director of Marketing at cellhelmet, a Pittsburgh device-protection brand, leading an eight-person in-house creative and social team and the full multi-channel program across 2022 and into 2023. (The brand’s 2022 rebrand, which I also led, is in the portfolio.)

The Challenge

Four things shaped every decision:

• Deep-pocketed national competitors. Brands like OtterBox and Casetify outspend a challenger many times over on the highest-intent terms. Buying the same keywords head-on is a losing trade; the opening had to be found in structure and specificity, not budget.
• A catalog that explodes by phone model. Every new iPhone and Samsung launch multiplies SKUs. The real catalog is 20-plus product lines fanned across thousands of made-to-order, per-model variants, and the marketing had to keep pace with each launch without fragmenting.
• Two revenue channels with different physics. An owned direct-to-consumer (D2C) storefront and a marketplace presence convert differently, reward different creative, and report separately. Run as two disconnected efforts, they compete; run as one system, they compound.
• A lot of creative, a small team. Paid, organic, retail packaging, and the marketplace all needed a steady supply of on-brand assets, produced by an eight-person team against a fast product calendar. Volume had to come from a system, not from heroics.

The Approach

Build the paid engine across search and Performance Max

The paid program was split by job. Paid search harvested existing high-intent demand: people already searching for screen protectors and cases by phone model. Performance Max covered the breadth of the catalog and did the prospecting search could not. Both ran on value-based bidding with tight budgets and disciplined kill-and-scale decisions, because a challenger cannot afford to let a losing campaign coast.

2.5M+ Paid impressions

▼

35K+ Clicks

▼

2,800+ Conversions

Investment by campaign type (~$35K total)

73%

27%

Paid Search 15 campaignsPerformance Max 8 campaigns

Across the roughly nine-month program the engine delivered real scale for its budget: over 2.5 million impressions, more than 35,000 clicks, and over 2,800 tracked conversions on around $35,000 of media. (Conversions are ad-platform-tracked; I am not claiming a blended return figure, because conversion-value attribution was only partial across the account.)

Campaign type	Campaigns	Share of spend	Job
Paid Search	15	~73%	Harvest high-intent demand (screen protectors, cases by model)
Performance Max	8	~27%	Catalog-wide shopping and prospecting

Scale the keyword program with structure, not sprawl

Against better-funded competitors, the keyword build is the battleground. The program grew from roughly 2,600 keywords in about 250 themed groups to nearly 29,000 keywords in around 4,200 groups in a single quarter, organized so that results rolled up to the theme and phone-model level where insight actually lives.

2022 Q4 ~250 groups ~2,600 keywords

2023 Q1 ~4,200 groups ~29,000 keywords

Plus 7,300+ phone-model terms2,500+ competitor-gap terms479 negatives

The scale-up was structured, not scattered: a 7,300-term phone-model matrix so every device generation was covered, a 2,500-term competitor-gap analysis to find the terms rivals ranked for and we did not, and a disciplined negative-keyword list to stop the budget leaking on searches that never convert.

Run the storefront and the marketplace as one revenue system

The two channels were treated as one system fed by one catalog and one creative platform. In 2022 they each did roughly $158,000, for about $316,000 in combined tracked revenue, with the storefront and the marketplace reinforcing rather than cannibalizing each other.

$158K

$158K

D2C storefront $158KMarketplace $158K

Brand lifetime (since 2012, for context)

$1.3M+ gross D2C revenue across 50K+ orders. I directed the 2022 to 2023 program, not the full history.

For context on the scale of the brand behind the program: cellhelmet has done more than $1.3M in gross D2C revenue across 50,000-plus orders since 2012. I directed the 2022-to-2023 marketing program, not the full multi-year history; the figure is here to show the size of the operation the system had to serve.

Lead an eight-person creative team on lead time

None of the above ships without the team. I led an eight-person in-house creative and social group (designers, a video producer, content and community roles) through a Creative Director, on a shared task board that tracked concurrent campaign workstreams against a quarterly calendar with dozens of dated moments mapped in advance. The operating belief was simple: people do their best work when they can see it coming. Plans locked ahead, briefs landed early, and the team shipped finished work across 20-plus product lines and every channel.

Instrument and measure to the sale

Web analytics ran underneath all of it (roughly 1.5 million pageviews across the ten months from April 2022), wired to transactions and channel rather than vanity traffic. The question was never “how much traffic”; it was “how many orders, from which channel, on which product line,” so the budget followed the revenue.

The Results

Liquid Glass

$44K

Case

$31K

All other lines

$15K

Tempered Glass

$14K

Charger

$11K

Cables

$7K

Screen protection (the Liquid Glass and Tempered Glass lines) and cases carried the storefront, exactly the demand the paid search program was built to harvest. Pulled together, the 2022-to-2023 program looked like this:

Signal	2022 to 2023 program
Paid impressions	2.5M+
Paid clicks	35K+
Paid conversions	2,800+
Paid investment	~$35K
D2C + marketplace revenue (2022)	$316K
Product lines marketed	20+
Site pageviews (10 months)	1.5M+

A few things stand out:

• Efficiency against bigger budgets. More than 2,800 conversions on roughly $35,000 of media, in a category where national brands spend many multiples of that, is the product of keyword structure and negative-list discipline, not budget.
• The two channels balanced. A storefront and a marketplace each doing about $158,000 in the same year is a portfolio, not a single point of failure; each covered the other’s soft spots.
• Demand and creative aligned. The lines that led revenue, screen protection and cases, are the same ones the paid program prioritized, so spend and supply argued the same case.

Key Takeaways

1. When you are outspent, structure beats budget. A disciplined keyword architecture, a phone-model matrix, a competitor-gap analysis, and a real negative list win terms that a bigger, lazier account leaves on the table.
2. Split the paid engine by job. Let search harvest the intent that already exists and let Performance Max cover the catalog and prospect; asking one campaign type to do both wastes both.
3. Run every channel as one revenue system. A storefront and a marketplace fed by one catalog and one creative platform compound; run as separate fiefdoms, they leak.
4. A fast product cadence runs on lead time. An eight-person team ships across 20-plus product lines only when the plan is visible early and the work is briefed before it is needed.

The category was cutthroat and the product cadence never slowed; the discipline was not exotic. Find the opening in structure, split the paid engine by job, run the channels as one system, and give a team the lead time to feed it. That is the same systems-over-heroics approach I bring to organic and AI search visibility now, at a different scale and in a different market, but on the same principles.