Charlies Stores rewrote its paid media playbook, and grew by letting go

About Charlies Stores

Charlies is an independent, family-run retailer founded in 1986, selling over 90,000 products across gardening, homeware, clothing, footwear, tools, camping and seasonal ranges. The business runs eight stores and a 108,000 sq ft warehouse from its head office in Welshpool, mid-Wales, with a team more than 400 strong and turnover around £100 million.

The Ecommerce and Marketing teams sit in-house at head office, and they carry a lot. 80% of online traffic comes from paid media, which makes it one of the company's most important commercial levers, and one of its most closely guarded. The product range is the source of both the strength and the difficulty: deep seasonal peaks in May and December, and retail values stretching from a few pounds at Christmas to four-figure garden furniture sets in spring.

The challenge

When paid media drives most of your traffic, control feels like the job. Charlies' team pulled levers, target ROAS, budgets, because adjusting them felt like doing right by the business. Performance leaned on two seasonal peaks, Christmas and garden furniture season, and the team worked hard to defend them.

But the instinct to intervene carried a cost they couldn't see from inside the account.

The question wasn't whether the team was working hard. It was whether the work was helping.

“Given the volume of traffic that comes from paid media, it always felt that we needed to be in the driving seat. Telling a small team of big doers to do less felt unsettling, especially when we feared losing control over one of our most important revenue drivers.”

The decision

Charlies chose to test the harder, more counterintuitive path: intervene less, and trust real demand to lead. Working with Upp.ai's Rubin model, the team kept what mattered to them, the budget, the targets, the commercial strategy, and handed the daily platform execution over.

Their own data settled it. The constant intervention was limiting performance. When the team made fewer changes, performance not only stabilised but scaled, and in some categories scaled fast.

So they changed how they worked. Targets now hold in campaigns all year round rather than churning through learning phases. The team sets the direction and reads the results, with steadier learning and clearer visibility across the whole shopping journey.

The new approach proved itself in the moments that matter most. When a pair of Charlies' Wellingtons appeared on a daytime TV show, the demand was captured and the traffic was on the site before the team had even seen the boots on air, an opportunity that manual management would have missed.

“We've got a good idea of budget, a robust target we want to achieve, and we let Upp.ai manage the rest.”

The results

Charlies grew because performance now tracks real demand rather than the team's interventions.

Revenue is up 25% year to date and profit has increased sevenfold. The clearest proof came in Q4 2025, historically the highest-stakes period of the year, when conversions rose 63% and conversion value 54%. Growth is now building across the core 365-day range, not just the seasonal peaks the business once relied on.

The shift in how the team works matters as much as the numbers. They no longer walk into peak periods wondering whether their Performance Max campaigns are set up the right way. They set the budget and the target, trust the system to respond, and spend their time on the strategic work a lean in-house team rarely gets to.

For Charlies, the lesson was the one that felt hardest to accept at the start: scaling paid media meant directing it, not driving it.

“Upp.ai has really allowed us to step back. There's a lot of areas of work we wouldn't move to fully manual management. Paid advertising is a key one.”

Managed by your team. Executed by Rubin.

Charlies set the budget, the target and the commercial strategy, and let Rubin handle the daily execution underneath. The credit for the growth stays exactly where it belongs: with the team that directed it.