When we started working with Aletheia & Phos, the brand only sold in Australia. About two years later, customers in the Middle East were messaging founder Alicia Millan to ask whether she could make the “I Carry Your Heart” necklace in solid gold.
Those people had never been to Melbourne. Most of them had probably never heard of the brand until an ad showed up in their feed, yet they wanted the piece badly enough to ask for a more expensive version of it.
Over those two years of running Meta ads for Aletheia & Phos, we doubled sales, brought customer acquisition costs down, and held ROAS steady while taking the brand into the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Here’s how we did it, and what we’d tell any Shopify founder thinking about selling outside their home market.
Alicia began making jewelry as a hobby. The designs came from her Greek and Italian heritage: the color of the sky, the taste of good olive oil, the myths and family stories she grew up with.
Then Australian model and influencer Mimi Elashiry found her work on Instagram. Their collaboration sold out in three weeks, and Alicia was suddenly running a real brand.
By the time she came to us, Aletheia & Phos had a loyal following in Melbourne and across Australia. The problem was the size of the pond. Australia is a small market, and the brand was close to the ceiling of what it could do there. Alicia wanted to sell internationally without turning the brand into something it wasn’t.
Getting an ad in front of someone in Los Angeles or Dubai is easy. Add the country to your ad set and Meta will happily spend the budget.
Getting that person to care is the hard part. In Australia, Aletheia & Phos had context working for it. People had seen the Mimi collab, or a friend wore a piece, or they’d walked past it in Melbourne. A cold buyer in another country has none of that. The ad has a second or two in the feed to do all of it at once.
The usual playbook for international expansion is to take the ads that work at home and switch on new countries, or to lead with a discount to get first orders. For a jewelry brand, that puts you up against every other necklace on Instagram, competing on price. We weren't willing to make that trade.
Alicia calls her jewelry a “wearable biography.” Each piece is meant to hold a feeling: the intensity of a Greek tragedy, the softness of a friendship, the rawness of heartbreak. The collection is full of constellations, zodiac signs, and talismanic pieces made to be carried on the body.
The hero product is an anatomical gold heart necklace, worn as a sign that you’ve given your heart to someone. Before we built a single ad, we spent time understanding why that piece mattered to the people who already owned it.
This is the first step in what we call our Brand DNA Performance System. We look at the product’s real strengths, what customers say about it, the desire behind the purchase, the different kinds of buyers, and the order the selling points should come in. That research becomes the creative direction, the angles, and the briefs.
For Aletheia & Phos, the answer was clear. Nobody buys an anatomical heart necklace for the chain length. They buy it for the person they’re giving it to, or because of the person who gave them theirs.
So the campaigns led with that. We paired intimate photography with lines like “I Carry Your Heart” and “Gifts for the One You Love.” The necklace was always in the frame, and the copy told you why it was worth wanting. No discounts, no plain product shots on white.
Materials and craftsmanship still mattered. They just came second. Details help someone decide on a necklace once they’re interested, but they don’t make anyone stop scrolling. A reason to give it to someone you love does.
We started with the US. Once those campaigns were selling profitably, we added selected markets in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
We didn’t rebuild the brand for each country. The creative kept the same emotional core everywhere, because love and heartbreak don’t need much translating. What changed was who saw it, not what it said.
The solid gold requests from the Middle East told us it was working. Customers on the other side of the world weren’t just buying the necklace. They wanted a version of it worth keeping for life.
Over the next two years:
The CAC number is the one we’re proudest of. Cold audiences in new countries are usually more expensive to convert, so most brands expect efficiency to slip as they expand. Aletheia & Phos doubled sales and paid less to acquire each customer while doing it.
Your home market might just be the first one that found you. Aletheia & Phos didn’t have an Australia-only product. It had an Australia-only audience. If your brand has hit a ceiling, the demand may already exist somewhere you haven’t advertised yet.
Know why people buy before you spend in a new country. You should be able to say it in one sentence. If you can’t, a new market will just make that gap more expensive.
Let that reason decide the ad. It should pick the photo, the first line of copy, and which selling point comes first. Specs and materials still belong in the ad, just not at the top.
Creative and media buying are one job. At Conversion Engine, the people who research your customers and brief the creative are the same people managing your campaigns. What we learn about your buyers shapes the ads, and campaign results tell us which messages are actually selling.
Alicia brought the designs and the story behind them. Our job was to get that story in front of people who’d never heard of her, and then make sure it landed.
If you want to know what your Meta ads should lead with, start with a Conversion Engine Brand DNA Analysis. We’ll look at your brand, your customers, and your current ads, and show you where the message is missing the reasons why people buy.
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