Bare Kind - cutting PPC reliance to build a stronger business

Andrew Kemp, CEO at Bare Kind, wanted SEO that worked in the real world. Q4 is their busiest trading period, so the brief was straightforward - improve organic performance quickly and give the team confidence that SEO could carry its weight without months of theory.

Our approach

In the first month of working together, we rebuilt the site’s foundations so it worked the way customers think. Using our Macaroni technology, we were able to rapidly restructure and optimise at scale:

∙ Overhauled the mega menu - redesigned navigation so shoppers could browse by animal and by colour, two of the most natural ways people buy Bare Kind socks.

∙ Rebuilt the site structure - reorganised collections and product groupings to mirror real shopping behaviour and reduce friction.

∙ Optimised product and collection descriptions - improved copy across key pages to be clearer, more consistent, and better aligned with how customers search.

∙ Built a robust internal linking system - connected related products and collections to improve discovery for customers and crawlability for search engines.

All of this was delivered in month one, something only possible through Macaroni’s ability to map, restructure, and optimise complex catalogues quickly. 

What changed

The impact was visible early. Sitewide impressions and clicks were up roughly 25% year on year, with some optimised pages seeing more than 500% growth in impressions. Organic revenue more than doubled heading into Q4 - up 103% - and the momentum held through peak. None of that came from gimmicks - it came from structure, clarity and speed.

Andy talked about this impact on the Winning with Shopify podcast, which you can view below. 

What Bare Kind did next

To test the strength of the channel, the team switched paid ads off from January through July. Revenue finished the period down 3% year on year while ad spend was down 100%, agency spend reduced, and profitability moved in the right direction. Andrew's summary was succinct - “crushed it”. He also called out the practical side of the work - a clear direction, fast execution, and a clear step-by-step path that didn’t treat SEO like a long-shot bet.

The case for fast execution

If you run a brand with a large catalogue, SEO has to be more than a quarterly slide deck. The work that moves the needle tends to be unglamorous - getting taxonomy right, assigning intent cleanly to pages, and making hundreds of small but correct decisions at pace. Done well, it makes paid media more optional, not more necessary. That doesn’t mean you should never spend on ads - Bare Kind will scale spend again for seasonal peaks - but it does mean you are not tied to it when the maths stops working.

Closing thought

Bare Kind’s strongest Q4 to date came from a practical, operator-led approach - a short, focused sprint, clean structure, and rapid on-page changes. The result was a channel that stood up to scrutiny and a founder who felt in control of how search drives the business.