Shopify Case Study: Faction Skis

How we used digital advertising to increase online revenue by 101% for the world’s freshest ski brand

To understand Faction, you first need to take a look at the broader snowsports scene at the turn of this century. In the early 00s, snowboarding had really found its feet and was bringing the energy and style of surf and skateboard culture up on to the slopes. But skiers were starting to feel left out. A lot of the manufacturers who had done all the important innovations in the 50s and 60s had faltered. They were now huge, bloated businesses locked in a race to the bottom, too afraid to take risks.

Freeride, pipe, and off-piste skiing were attracting more attention, but the ski brands simply didn’t exist that could support the scene. The sport was becoming stifled when it should have been thriving. Two skiers who wanted to change that were Faction founders, Alex Hoye and Tony McWilliam. Inspired by the technology, designs and vibe of snowboarding, they set out to produce skis that catered better to this new kind of skier, those who wanted to be more creative with how they enjoyed the snow. On new ski designs, they experimented with rocker, ski waist, and introduced lightweight hybrid cores. They reinvented how a ski could look, too, using graphics inspired by the burgeoning street art scene in Europe and the States.

Over the last 20 years, as alternative skiing has surged in popularity, Faction has cemented itself at the core of the scene, growing to become one of the leading midsize ski brands in the world. In part, this is down to their innovation with production; they continue to experiment with ski design for all-mountain and alternative skiing disciplines. But it’s also been down to their fresh approach to how skis are sold and marketed. From the start, they swerved traditional advertising in favour of seizing the gap online left open by traditional ski brands. Today, they work with some of the world’s most creative skiers, creating the world’s wildest skiing content with athlete ambassadors including Eileen Gu, Alex Hall and Mac Forehand. Their most well-known relationship is with renegade skier, Candide Thovex, who they worked with since the start of his career. In the video that’s done the best job of capturing modern skiing’s disdain for traditional constraints – Audi’s viral Ski the World ad – it’s Faction skis Candide’s wearing as he slaloms down the world’s snow-free wonders, famously needing just one pair for the shoot.

Growing Faction Skis’ Shopify

Faction approached nativve in 2024. The brand had been growing steadily and had recently secured significant investment funding. While the majority of their skis were sold in retailers, they wanted to continue to strengthen sales on their Shopify sites, reaching new customers in established and emerging markets across Europe and North America. Their current agency was getting results, but it wasn’t in line with where they wanted to be and they felt like they would be better suited to an agency with specialist knowledge of their target audience.

We’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest outdoor and apparel brands for over a decade. As Patagonia Europe’s primary digital marketing partner, we developed effective, multi-channel advertising campaigns for international environmental initiatives – like Save the Blue Heart and ArtiFishal – as well as supporting key winter sports campaigns like their AW23 Back Country Touring and GoreTex. We understand how important quality creative and solid storytelling are for premium brands and we knew we could reach the kind of customers that would love Faction using digital ads.

We were the perfect fit and the team at Faction agreed. So for the 24/25 season, we set out to show them what we could do.

A Better Agency/Client Collaboration

In our experience, streamlined communication and improved transparency make an agency-client collaboration most effective. As standard, we set up a Slack channel for Faction, giving their team direct access to their account managers and the wider nativve team, enabling lightning-fast queries and responses. To enhance collaboration further, we gave them access to a dedicated Notion board, which acted as a hub for discussing and planning campaign timelines and content calendars.

As well as providing a detailed report on a monthly basis, we built Faction a custom reporting dashboard. This covered all the key metrics from the digital advertising we were managing, as well as metrics from across their digital marketing activity, so we all had a holistic view of what was working and how that impacted the bigger picture.

Auditing and Improving Digital Advertising Performance

Our first step to improving Faction’s Shopify performance was to audit each advertising channel’s set up. This included reviewing catalogues on Meta and Google, ensuring they were all optimised and fully integrated with the ad platform’s merchant accounts.

Most crucially, we reviewed how data was used and stored. Tightening data privacy laws have increased focus on first-party data collection, but third-party cookies face uncertainty rather than obsolescence. For effective digital advertising, having a comprehensive data strategy is critical. For Faction, we implemented robust server-to-server integrations, enabling us to have accurate attribution across platforms. This helped with reporting, allowing us to have a clear understanding of what was working. For targeting, it was pivotal for maximising the efficiency of the ad platforms.

Paid Social Strategy for Winter Sports

Skis are a very different product to regular, repeat purchases like clothing or cosmetics with broad appeal. While popular, skiing’s still a specialised pursuit and skis are high-value, long-lasting, and even the most dedicated amateur will only own a handful of pairs. Moreover, Faction sits at the top end within ski brands and caters to more adventurous and specialised skiers; their target customers are more discerning, more attuned to a brand’s reputation on the slopes.

Accounting for this, we knew we needed a strong strategy that would guide customers through making one of their most considered purchases of the year. We proposed a full funnel across Google P-Max, YouTube, and Meta (Instagram and Facebook), and suggested the introduction of TikTok for top-of-the-funnel activity. Within this, we aimed to make use of Faction’s rich portfolio of quality static and video assets, pushing athletes’ gnarly social content, product videos, campaign-specific statics, and dynamic product content to the customer at just the right point in their journey.

As we were managing Faction’s digital advertising across all their global markets, we needed to be reactive with how we approached budget allocation between each region, accounting for performance as well as wider local and global market trends. Over the season, we moved dynamically, splitting and merging markets to improve efficacy. We combined this approach with the introduction of localised language ads for key markets in Germany and France, ensuring we got results on a local level.

Maximising Profit Margins Before Revenue Volume

Naturally, winter sports’ demand cycle is heavily seasonal, lasting from September through to April. Many brands, including Faction, don’t advertise at all outside of this period. With the demand condensed and the audience already small, competition is fierce. Pre-season, peak season, and the holidays are all key buying periods that businesses absolutely need to get right. 

For winter sports brands, it can be tempting to see the end-of-season sale as an opportunity to stretch out the season and give a final boost to the year’s results. While this can make ad platform metrics look impressive, leaning too heavily on sales has a much less positive impact on the bigger picture. A premium brand like Faction risks dinting its perceived value if prices are slashed and sales are pushed too hard every April. What’s most important, though, is that a sales-heavy strategy conflates high-revenue with success, when it’s profit that should ultimately be the strategy’s true north star. 

After looking at Faction’s results from the previous year, we concluded the budget allocation leaned much too far towards the end of season sales. We flipped that around, front-loading the budget so we could introduce more customers to Faction earlier on and guide more of them towards a purchase at the highest margin.

101% Revenue Growth with Reduced Ad Spend

In their first season working with nativve, Faction’s D2C did the best it ever has. Despite a reduction of spend in 24/25 vs 23/24, the ads worked harder. Cost per thousand impression (CPM) was 10% lower and the ads earned almost 40 million impressions across all platforms during the season. With ad ROAS up to 12.8 from 7.2, the total Shopify revenue rose by over 100% compared with the previous year.

As we boot up ready for the 25/26 season, we’re looking forward to tweaking the strategy and getting more skiers exploring on and off piste in skis made by the world’s most innovative ski brand.