A Barefoot Shoe Brand Built on Conviction
Peluva was founded by Mark and Kyle Sisson, names already well known in the primal health and ancestral fitness world. The product is a five-toe minimalist shoe designed around a simple idea: feet work better when they are allowed to move the way they evolved to move.
That conviction gave Peluva a devoted early following. The harder question was how to reach the next wave of customers who had never heard of barefoot footwear but were already spending money on the things that surround it, from gym memberships to recovery tools to supplements.
Broad Targeting Was Paying for the Wrong People
Peluva leaned on Meta's broad and algorithmic targeting to scale. The algorithm optimized toward whoever converted cheapest in the moment, which meant a lot of spend went to audiences with no real affinity for the category.
The result was a cost per acquisition around $112, a number that made profitable scale nearly impossible for a considered purchase at Peluva's price point. The team did not need more reach. They needed the right people.
Audiences Built From What People Actually Buy
GoAudience built custom audiences from real consumer spending data across 220 million US adults, isolating the households whose purchase history signaled genuine category affinity: gym and fitness studio spend, recovery and wellness products, supplements, outdoor and running gear, and the specific brands that cluster around the biohacking community.
Those segments were exported straight into Peluva's Meta account and run against the existing broad campaigns. No creative overhaul, no landing page rebuild. The only variable that changed was who saw the ads.
Impact and Outcome
- CAC down 60%, from $112 to $43 per new customer
- ROAS up 2.3x on GoAudience-targeted delivery
- 843% return on the GoAudience investment
- Measured in under three weeks from the first audience going live
Peluva's results show what happens when targeting starts from evidence rather than inference. The creative did not change and the offer did not change. Putting the same ads in front of people whose spending already pointed toward the category was enough to make the whole program profitable at scale.