Case study · Our own brand
We test it on our own money first.
Raised On It is the Florida outdoor apparel brand CJ started with his two brothers in 2020. It's where WorkHorse runs every channel before we'd run it for a client: ads, email and text, cold outreach, site rebuilds. We keep score from the store's own records, not the ad dashboard. Here's what that taught us.
orders shipped since 2023
Shopify
Instagram followers
five-star reviews
Google search visitors who reached checkout, the best of any traffic source
Shopify, trailing 12 months
Client snapshot
- Brand
- Raised On It, Florida heritage outdoor apparel (tees, hats, long sleeves).
- Industry
- Direct-to-consumer e-commerce, plus events and wholesale.
- Location
- South Florida, with 74% of orders shipping to Florida addresses.
- Started
- 2020.
- Relationship
- It's our own brand. Nobody pays us to run it, which is exactly why we're honest about it.
- Channels we've run
- Meta ads, email and SMS, Shopify site, wholesale cold email, in-person events, Instagram.
The challenge
One of the hardest ways there is to make marketing pay.
Selling $30 to $40 shirts is tough. After the shirt, shipping and the labor to pack it, every ad dollar has to come back about twice over just to break even. Ad dashboards grade their own homework: Meta's reported results ran ahead of what the store actually recorded. Demand comes in spikes around Christmas and spring event weekends. And with a small crew, every channel has to earn its keep in time as well as money. That's a tougher spot than most contractors are in, and that's the point: a play that holds up on a $34 shirt has a lot more room on a five-figure hardscape job.
What we built
Every channel, run on our own dime.
- 1
Rebuilt the store
New Shopify theme in August 2026, product pages with real reviews, a pairs-well-with row ranked by what's in stock, and simpler flat pricing with free shipping on two or more.
- 2
Ran Meta ads with real profit math
A per-order margin model counting the shirt, fees, shipping and labor, with hard kill, hold and scale lines, read from Shopify's records, not Meta's.
- 3
Email and text marketing
List warming, abandoned-cart and post-purchase automations, campaigns to a 6,400+ subscriber list, and a Founder Fridays story series.
- 4
Wholesale cold email to Florida retailers
365 stores narrowed to the ones worth pitching, every address verified, separate sending domains and warmed-up inboxes, four sequences tested against each other.
- 5
Studied the competition
Audited the ad libraries of three regional apparel brands.
- 6
Wired up the CRM
Pipelines for custom B2B orders, abandoned-checkout recovery, order follow-ups and review requests.
Results
What our own money taught us.
Google search visitors reached checkout at 3.09%, Facebook at 1.82%, Instagram at 1.29%.
Shopify, trailing 12 months
months where Meta ads cleared break-even, even by Meta's own numbers.
Florida retailers who asked for more in the first 9 days of cold email, with 0 bounces and 0 unsubscribes.
five-star reviews: the product was never the problem.
Lesson 1
People searching are already looking for you
The best-converting traffic came from Google search, and we never paid for it. That's why, for contractors, we build for Google and AI search first.
Lesson 2
Know the math before you buy ads
At a t-shirt-sized basket, paid social almost never paid back. On a $10,000 job the math is completely different. We'll show you the break-even before we spend a dollar of yours, measured from your books, not the ad dashboard.
Lesson 3
Cold email works when it's built right
Separate sending domains, verified lists, plain-spoken copy, and let the numbers pick the winning sequence fast. Four stores raised their hands in nine days. It's the same setup we run for contractors going after property managers and commercial work.
Lesson 4
Fix what's already built before you buy more traffic
Our abandoned-cart text brought back orders. The email version went to almost four times as many people and brought back none.
The report
Straight from the account.
Pulled from the store's own records, not the ad dashboard. Every chart shows its date range and source.
Visitors who reached checkout, by traffic source
Shopify sessions that reached checkout · Sep 16, 2025 to Sep 16, 2026
Orders per quarter
Shopify order counts, online + events · Jan 2023 to Sep 16, 2026 · 3,203 orders
The work
What we actually shipped.
Ads
Swamp Buggy Tee video · 799,892 impressions in 2025
Florida's Legacy collection · 256,871 impressions in 2025
Free Florida shipping · 146,463 impressions in 2025
Old-school Florida carousel · 218,202 impressions in 2025
Meta ads from Raised On It's ad account, now paused. Impressions per Meta.
“[Founder note from CJ]”
CJ George, Co-founder, Raised On It and WorkHorse Growth Partners
Want an agency that's spent its own money finding out what works?
We'll tell you what pays, what doesn't, and why, before we spend a dollar of yours.
Numbers are from Raised On It's Shopify store records and Meta ad account, pulled November 2026.