How fashion brand Never Fully Dressed achieved 890% ROAS through Google Ads

Contemporary womenswear brand Never Fully Dressed was born in 2009, when founder Lucy Aylen began selling her wares in London’s prestigious Portobello Market. Beginning with a sewing machine bought by her grandad, Never Fully Dressed has now been featured in The Hollywood Reporter, its famous Boob Tee has been worn by celebrities like Kendall Jenner and, in June 2023, its first permanent US store opened its doors in New York.

“We’re an inclusive brand with broad appeal among women,” explains Roz Brabner, Head of E-Commerce at Never Fully Dressed. “Someone in their twenties may find us when they need to look for a dress for an occasion; a customer in their sixties may pop into our Essex store.”

Since 2018, it’s been with Google. Through its performance marketing agency, Brandog Digital, Never Fully Dressed has scaled – expanding to new markets.

“Google Ads were the obvious choice for us,” says Will Forster, Founder of Brandog Digital. “From early brand Search campaigns, we saw immediate success, generating huge demand from a smaller investment. We wanted to follow up on that and capture everyone out there that wanted to find us.”

Through the Google channel on Shopify, Never Fully Dressed began using Performance Max campaigns and Dynamic Search ads to drive greater sales and new customer acquisition. This allowed the brand to showcase its wide assortment of clothing, showing the right product to the right customer at the right time, while finding customers making non-brand searches on Google.

“We may not be explicitly advertising a dress with a red lobster design, but if someone searches for it on Google, that product comes up thanks to Performance Max,” says Will. “It’s competitive out there on non-brand searches. But through Dynamic Search Ads, we find those keyword niches that are less competitive and more profitable – we’ve been able to unlock a new set of keywords around wedding guests, for example.”

The Never Fully Dressed and Brandog teams have also optimised along the way, implementing features across the Google Ads ecosystem.

“Google is deeper than other channels – that’s valuable once you test, learn and optimise,” says Will. “We’ve used target ROAS, smart bidding and feed optimisation. We’ve also tweaked keywords, introduced new customer-only bidding and negative keywords. There are a lot of levers to pull in the Google ecosystem.”

Google Ads have helped Never Fully Dressed scale, expand to new markets and acquire new customers. Since using Performance Max and Dynamic Search Ads, it’s seen a 890% ROAS, with Google now representing over 40% of its online revenue.

Going forward, Never Fully Dressed plans to utilise the Google ecosystem even further, increase its top of funnel awareness and find new customers that may not be looking to buy womenswear right away – but may do so in the future.

“Google Ads really help us generate sales, so we’re planning to use YouTube as a means of growing brand awareness,” says Roz. “As we continue to expand, we’ll ensure that when we launch our YouTube campaign that we see a benefit in a direct channel like Search: YouTube is our brand awareness tool, Google is our sales channel.”

Through the help of Google, Never Fully Dressed has grown from the vintage market stalls of London into a becoming global brand opening pop-ups and its first brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan.

“The plan is to expand even further and do more internationally at the top of the marketing funnel,” says Will. “The next step now isn’t just driving sales through Google – it’s establishing Never Fully Dressed not just as a brand that’s up and coming, but one that’s arrived.”