New customers at £28.

Ostra ParfumsFragranceCreative, Paid socialQ1 2026

Forty-two hooks for one fragrance, tested for a week on real money. Three of them now carry 80% of the spend, and a new customer costs £28 instead of £52.

Client: Ostra Parfums
Sector: Fragrance
Channels: Creative, Paid social
Period: Q1 2026

−46%

cost per new customer

Hooks tested: Forty-two
Scaled: Three
Time: Three weeks

Profitable new customers, no discount code.

Ostra makes three fragrances in small batches in Lyon and sells almost all of them online. Its ads were beautiful, slow and expensive: a new customer cost £52 against a first order worth £64.

The spring launch needed to make the first order profitable on its own, and Ostra did not want to train customers to wait for a code.

Client since: 2025
Hooks tested: Forty-two
Markets: UK, France
Upwell team: Five

Three moves.

What we changed, in the order we changed it.

Weeks 1–2
Forty-two hooks, one bottle
One studio day, twelve sets and a single bottle. Every hook had to work with the sound off and land in under two seconds: a line, a texture, a reaction or a price. Nothing was cut for being too plain.
42 hooks from one shoot day
Week 3
A week of cheap, honest tests
£6,000 spread evenly across all forty-two. We judged each on two numbers: who was still watching at three seconds, and what it cost to get someone to add the bottle to their basket.
£6k to test all 42
Week 4 onwards
Three winners, scaled hard
The three best hooks took 80% of the budget within a fortnight. The studio now recuts them every month with new openings, so the winners stay fresh without starting again.
3 hooks · 80% of spend