Results at a Glance
The Challenge
Alicia Millan started Aletheia & Phos as a hobby, hand-making jewelry inspired by her Greek and Italian heritage — the color of the sky, the taste of good olive oil, the stories she grew up on. Then Australian model and influencer Mimi Elashiry spotted the designs on Instagram. The collaboration that followed sold out in three weeks, and Millan found herself running a real brand almost overnight.
By the time Alicia came to Conversion Engine, Aletheia & Phos had a devoted following in Melbourne and across Australia, but growth had a ceiling: the market that had discovered and fallen in love with the brand was, geographically, a small one. Alicia wanted to take the label international — into the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East — without losing what made it special in the first place.
The Approach: Identifying the Core Brand DNA
Alicia describes Aletheia & Phos as a "wearable biography" — jewelry built to hold real human emotion, from the intensity of a Greek tragedy to the softness of friendship to the vulnerability of heartbreak. That idea runs through the work itself: constellations, zodiac symbols, and talismanic pieces like anatomical gold hearts, all designed to be carried on the body rather than simply worn.
The hero of the collection is an anatomical heart necklace, worn as a symbol of giving your heart to the love of your life. Before building a single ad, Conversion Engine studied that ethos closely — the symbolism, the mythology, the emotional register of each piece — because the whole growth strategy depended on customers abroad feeling the same connection to the brand that Alicia's Australian following already had.
The Execution
Conversion Engine built and designed ad campaigns around that emotional core rather than around the jewelry as product. Every ad was built to match Aletheia & Phos's ethos completely — the same intensity, softness, and vulnerability running through Alicia's designs — and let that emotional resonance, not discounting or generic product shots, introduce the brand to new markets.
The Results
The strategy worked incredibly well. Aletheia & Phos expanded profitably well beyond Australia, with significant growth across the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Demand in the Middle East grew strong enough that the brand began receiving direct requests for solid gold versions of the "I Carry Your Heart" necklace — a sign the emotional story was landing with an audience an ocean away from where it started.
Over two years, Conversion Engine doubled Aletheia & Phos's sales while lowering customer acquisition costs and holding a consistent return on ad spend — proof that the international growth wasn't just wider, it was highly profitable.
Why It Worked
Aletheia & Phos's international growth wasn't the product of a bigger budget or a new market tactic. It came from treating the brand's emotional core as universal — the idea that heartbreak, love, and vulnerability translate across borders even when language and culture don't. By building campaigns that matched that ethos completely, Conversion Engine opened the door to international expansion without diluting the story that made the brand worth discovering in the first place.
