$31.8M in Revenue at 5.39x ROAS for a D2C Fitness Brand

Who is SMRTFT?

SMRTFT is a direct-to-consumer fitness equipment company selling the Nüobell adjustable dumbbell — a dial-adjust dumbbell in 80lb and 100lb versions that replaces a full rack of fixed weights in a home gym. The brand sells on Shopify at smrtft.com to home-gym buyers across the United States. Founder and CEO Rob R. runs it.

The product carried a high price and a long consideration cycle. Buyers researched it for weeks, compared it against racks and competitors, and often bought only after seeing it demonstrated — behaviour that shaped everything we built. The engagement ran from July 2021 to April 2026 and ended when SMRTFT restructured and moved media buying in-house; it was not a performance decision — the final full week of the account was its strongest on record.

What was the challenge?

SMRTFT had a genuinely great product and a digital presence that wasn't doing it justice. The site was carrying someone else's mistakes: a previous developer had left customer-only pages publicly indexed — pages that were never meant to be crawlable at all. Yvonne, in August 2021: “This should NEVER be public! Only customers allowed log in should be able to see them, not public!” Nothing organic could be built until that was repaired.

Scale was the real test. Plenty of accounts hold 6x on $10K a month; very few hold it at $280K a month. The target we were measured against was 3.5x blended ROAS with a CPA ceiling of $90–$120, and the ask was to hold that line while spend climbed by an order of magnitude. Inventory moved underneath us too — the Nüobell sold out repeatedly across five years, so spend had to expand and contract around stock and the account could never simply be set and scaled.

How did Lantern Sol approach it?

We treated SMRTFT as one funnel across two platforms, not two ad accounts with two scorecards. The decision that shaped everything: let Google capture demand and Meta create it. Search, Shopping and Performance Max caught buyers already looking for adjustable dumbbells — high intent, high conversion value, the profit engine — while Meta ran prospecting and retargeting to build the audience that would later show up in Search. Judging each platform on its own last-click ROAS would have starved the top of the funnel and eventually starved Search too, so we managed to blended return.

Brand and non-brand were never blended: Brand Search was measured separately so non-brand performance couldn't hide behind it, and when the client later directed us to bid Brand Search on Target Impression Share, we ran it, measured the delivery collapse and reverted it inside a month. Creative was treated as a media variable — video, carousel, static and UGC tested continuously, with budget moving on measured ROAS rather than on which asset looked best. And reporting ran weekly, not monthly: budget decisions were made against seven days of data, which is what made it possible to scale into Black Friday and pull back into a stock-out without whipsawing the account.

What did we build?

Google Ads. Performance Max on the Nüobell catalog at up to $350/day on target ROAS — the volume driver, running roughly 82% new customers. Brand Search, measured and reported separately from non-brand. Standard Shopping run alongside PMax as a controlled comparison rather than a replacement, with target ROAS recalibrated to 550% and 65 negative keywords added in the final quarter. Related-search and non-brand Search for buyers researching the category. YouTube and Demand Gen for demonstration-led awareness, including a Shorts campaign. Google Merchant Center feed management throughout, plus dedicated 80lb and 100lb pre-sale campaign builds.

Meta Ads. A three-campaign structure — testing, scaling and retargeting — so winners could be promoted without disturbing proven spend. Prospecting ad sets split by creative type so UGC testimonial and feature-benefit angles competed head to head. Dynamic product ads off the Shopify catalog. Creator and review video ads with named partners, plus statics built from the brand's Men's Health award. Retargeting split by audience — existing 80lb owners against non-converting visitors — with Klaviyo engaged-list targeting and 30-day buyer exclusions.

SEO. Technical remediation of the indexing problems left by the prior developer, then keyword strategy and on-page work across category and product pages, and a sustained link acquisition program — several hundred backlinks submitted and approved across 2021 and 2022.

Measurement. A Looker Studio dashboard blending Google and Meta into one view. Weekly creative reporting through Atria showing top and bottom performers on 7- and 30-day windows. A budget pacing sheet in the client's own format, used for spend control and invoicing. Google Ads enhanced conversions rebuilt inside Shopify alongside the client's developer after a tracking break.

What were the results?

The lifetime number: across September 2021 to April 2026, SMRTFT spent $5,920,663 with Lantern Sol on Google and Meta and recorded $31,898,000 in tracked revenue — a blended 5.39x. That is 54% above the 3.5x target, sustained across 56 consecutive months. The first $1M month landed in November 2021, roughly two months after paid media launched.

Peak month was November 2022: $1,531,626 in revenue on $281,310 in spend — 5.44x at more than a quarter-million dollars of monthly spend. Holding target ROAS at that scale, not the peak multiple itself, is the result worth reading twice. March 2026 was the strongest full month on Google in the account's history — 8.93x on $9,966 in spend — and blended across both platforms $15,629 returned roughly $110,277 that month, a 7.06x.

The final full week, April 5–11 2026, was the best week ever recorded: $3,036.22 in combined spend returned $40,721.35, a blended 13.4x. Google ran 10.84x with CAC down 46% week over week; Meta ran 18.69x with CAC down 52%. On SEO, top-10 keyword rankings grew 190% and monthly organic revenue grew 688% in the program's first four months; over its life Domain Rating climbed from 9 to 34, top-10 rankings peaked at 303, and monthly organic revenue peaked at $357,451 in January 2022.