Scaling an Art Brand: How Danny Issues Grew 108% Profitability with StoreHero and Bearhouse

Danny Issues is a London-based artist and designer brand. Word spread quickly among collectors and art enthusiasts. As demand grew, Danny partnered with Bearhouse Media, an Irish eCommerce agency that specialized in helping artists sell online. Their ad campaigns delivered impressive results—increased traffic, higher conversions, and growing sales.

While Bearhouse Media delivered strong advertising performance, a gap remained between scaling and scaling profitably. Without a clear view of profitability data, making smarter decisions about ad spend remained a challenge.

Danny Issues had a strong brand but needed guidance in selling art online efficiently and profitably. Despite having a product that collectors loved, three major roadblocks stood in the way of sustainable expansion:

• Limited paid advertising experience – Danny Issues lacked knowledge when it came to Facebook Ads Manager and Google campaigns. The business needed someone who could translate their artistic vision into profitably success.
• Making every ad dollar count – Simply throwing more money at advertising wasn’t an option for this bootstrapped business. The brand needed to ensure that increased ad spend directly translated to profitable growth, not just more expensive customer acquisition.
• Lack of clear profitability visibility – The most frustrating part? Not knowing which products, campaigns, or customer segments were actually making money. Without connecting the dots between marketing costs and true profit margins, the brand couldn’t make informed decisions about where to double down or pull back.

Bearhouse brought in StoreHero as the missing piece in Danny Issues’ growth puzzle. This powerful profit reporting platform bridged the gap between just scaling and scaling intelligently when selling art online. By implementing StoreHero’s suite of analytics tools, Bearhouse transformed Danny’s business with actionable insights:

📊 Clear View of Profitability – StoreHero enabled Danny Issues and the agency Bearhouse, to see exactly how much profit they were generating on every new customer order. This insight reassured them that they weren’t just increasing sales but also maintaining a healthy contribution margin.

📈 Scaling Ads with Confidence – With a transparent profitability dashboard, the agency Bearhouse could confidently increase ad spend, knowing that it was driving incremental profit, not just revenue.

🔄 Customer Segmentation & Repeat Sales Opportunity – Since Danny Issues is primarily a new customer-driven business, StoreHero validated that the main focus should be acquisition. However, it also highlighted opportunities for repeat sales, opening the door for future growth strategies around retention.

🎨 Creative Performance Optimization – Using StoreHero’s creative overview feature, the brand could track which ad creatives were driving the highest returns. This allowed them to amplify winning content while quickly cutting underperformers, significantly improving overall campaign efficiency.

💰 LTV and Product Profitability Analysis – By analyzing lifetime value (LTV) by first purchase and product-level profitability, Bearhouse identified that customers purchasing wood frames were significantly more valuable. This insight led to upsell strategies, further boosting overall margins.

Within just a few months of implementing StoreHero, Danny Issues achieved remarkable growth that went far beyond expectations:

The most nerve-wracking decision had been ramping up ad spend, but with StoreHero’s profit analytics providing confidence, Danny increased marketing investment by 94%. Unlike previous attempts at scaling, this time every additional pound spent was backed by solid profitability forecasts.

This strategic investment paid immediate dividends. New customers started flooding in – a staggering 106% increase compared to pre-StoreHero numbers. Even more impressive, existing customers began returning at unprecedented rates, with repeat sales jumping by 140%, validating that the retention strategies informed by StoreHero’s data were working exceptionally well.

The bottom-line impact told the real story: contribution margin grew by 108%, proving that this wasn’t just about selling more – it was about selling smarter. Danny could now see exactly which products, campaigns, and customer segments drove the highest profits, allowing for precision-targeted growth rather than the scattershot approach of the past.

By aligning advertising spend with real-time profitability data, Danny Issues and Bearhouse have not just scaled but done so with confidence, ensuring profitable growth and continued scaling. The partnership demonstrates how combining creative expertise with data-driven decision making creates a sustainable model for eCommerce success – one that other art and craft businesses can learn from as they navigate their own digital transformation journeys.  We’re excited to see how the new AI-powered version of StoreHero will further enhance Danny Issues’ success in 2025.