September 1-8 landed at 88.8% of Ailis' sheet, -£6,013 short over eight days. Her subscription line is ahead. The entire gap is her online line, which is set at £4,000 to £5,000 a day on days with no launch and no sale. Online revenue has run about £3,500 a day on ordinary days since the start of August, and September 1-8 ran £3,599. New customers, ad efficiency, ad fatigue, the consolidation and the website were each tested below and none of them moved. Two things Casey raised are real and are now in the page: Cook and the Citronella starter packs went out of stock, worth about £543 a day against early August, and the seasonal lift is real but lands after mid-month. Without the stock-outs September's ordinary days would be running ahead of August's, which is what every prior year shows.
Her subscription line includes subscription first orders, so they are counted there here too (£6,176 of them in 8 days). Same total, same basis as her sheet.
Four August days made the August average: the Emily Doran collab launch on 14 August (£11,068 online) and the Bank Holiday 20% off weekend on 28-30 August (£7,866, £6,210, £7,416). Strip those four days out and August ran £3,518 a day. September 1-8 ran £3,599 with four ordinary emails and no launch. That is the same business at the same speed. Her sheet spreads August's launch-inflated average across launch-free days, which is why every ordinary day in September reads as a miss.
What this means for the month. The fix is in the sheet, not the store: rebase ordinary days to about £3,500 and put the launch and email bumps on top, which is how our own tracker shapes days. Her September total then depends almost entirely on the 12 September Rust & Amber launch and the ad ladder behind it, not on ordinary days catching up.
Casey is right that September carries a seasonal tailwind, and the last three years show exactly what shape it takes. Two things matter for reading the first eight days:
What it changes. Nothing about the ordinary-day verdict on the sheet, and everything about where the month is won: the seasonal demand and the launch both land in the same fortnight, which is the argument for holding budget for the 12 September step rather than spending it on ordinary days now.
Every candidate cause Casey raised, with the test used and the verdict. Green means the data cleared it. Amber means it is real but small.
This is why the ordinary-day total is flat rather than up with the season. Fig, Roses and Tomato Vine absorbed most of it, but not all. Cook is a Q4 product and her sheet has a "Cook is BACK" email on the 19th (lever 6). Citronella is an outdoor summer line and its window is closing anyway.
Acquisition volume is fine. The one soft edge is the basket, which is a landing-page and offer question, and it is lever 4 below.
This is the August pull-forward we measured on 3 September, not churn. The base is intact; it simply is not being pulled forward by a sale this week.
Spend is not the reason for the gap and extra spend at current efficiency is not the profitable answer either. The ladder step on the 12th is justified only because the launch resets efficiency (Tomato Vine moved CAC 24% in June). Keep the 19 September gate: step on only if trailing CAC on the 12-18 rung is under £47.
Whatever changed in the account structure, the money is coming back at the same rate it did in August.
Ad 707, a quarter of evergreen spend since mid-August, is drifting gently (2.27x → 2.99x → 1.82x → 1.90x → 1.79x → 1.70x by week). Worth a refresh in the autumn set, not an emergency.
Ad 837, the Fig hero, is the exception at 1.80x and earns its evergreen place. The rest belong in the test campaign until they beat the old ads.
Consolidation concentrated the same efficiency into fewer lines. Looking at the evergreen campaign on its own makes it look like a decline; looking at the account shows it is not.
Pixel sessions undercount true traffic, so read the direction, not the level. Direction: fewer visits, more of them buying.
Triple Whale pixel conversion for the whole site is up. Pixel and Meta agree the site is not the problem; the homepage is simply converting fewer returning brand searchers without a sale on it. The CRO re-audit already found the homepage shows no social proof and 82% of mobile sessions never scroll past the collection tiles: both fixes are queued there.
Google is 22% of spend. Shopping High is the only line in either platform that got materially worse in September, and it is lever 3.
The launch on the 12th is the big lever and it is already planned. These are the things that improve results at the same spend on ordinary days, ranked by what they are worth. Together the four same-spend levers add about £337 a day of revenue, roughly £137 a day of contribution, or £7,420 of revenue over the rest of September. That closes a bit under half of the ordinary-day gap to her sheet. Cook's return adds roughly £208 a day on top once it is back. The rest of her online number only ever existed on launch and sale days.
16 autumn ads inside evergreen took £1,165 (14% of its spend) at 1.36x and £53 CPA, against 1.84x and £40 for the old ads beside them. The ring-fenced Testing Autumn campaign runs 2.38x at £26. Keep Ad 837 (the Fig hero, 1.80x) in evergreen, move the rest to the test campaign and let them earn their way back.
Roses was the best cold campaign in the account (2.57x, £30 CPA, £143/day in August and £57/day in September) and was paused on 4 Sept in the consolidation. Evergreen's marginal pound is running about 1.77x. Restore it at £60/day.
Shopping High fell from 2.13x in August to 1.22x on £207/day (£52 per conversion vs Meta's £36). Cut it to £100/day, push the £100 into the evergreen budget (that alone gets Meta to the £1,220 rung our ladder asked for), and check the feed carries Fig and Tonka with autumn titles before the 12th.
New-customer AOV slipped from £72 to £68 as starter-pack share fell from 69% to 63%. Two causes we can touch: the autumn ads land on the homepage (their landing-page-view rate is 87% vs 97% for the old ads) and the canonical Starter Pack page carries no subscription offer. Point the autumn ads at the Fig starter pack, and put the subscription option back on the canonical Starter Pack page.
Zigpoll verbatims (3 Sept): the subscription checkout shows £65-69 recurring when the ad says £25-29, and the "New to Pott £5" code fails for some buyers. Both are unfixed. Neither is sized here because we cannot see how many abandon, but they are free to fix and they sit exactly where the autumn launch traffic will land.
Every Cook SKU except the MatchPott is at zero: refills, candles, starter packs and the quarterly subscription. Cook sold £208 a day of line revenue across August and £29 a day in September. Her sheet has a "Cook is BACK" email on the 19th, so the product presumably lands before then. Worth confirming the date now: if it slips, that email has nothing to sell.
Returning revenue is not down on ordinary days (£2031/day vs £1769 in the last ordinary week of August), but August's returning spike was a 20% sale plus collab codes, and September has neither. Fig refills are the top returning product this month. A Klaviyo flow that fires 6-8 weeks after a refill purchase, at full price, replaces the sale lift without training the list to wait for 20% off.
What not to do. Do not chase the sheet with budget on ordinary days. At today's efficiency the next pound returns about 1.32x on first order, which loses money in the month and only pays back on a 12-month view. Do not add a discount to close the returning gap; August's sale is exactly why September's returning line looks soft. And do not read the evergreen campaign's own ROAS as the health of the account.
The one number to watch after the 12th. Trailing CAC on the 12-18 rung. Under £47, step to the 19 September rung. Over, hold and close the month at £2,848 a day. Her sheet's £248,177 needs 1.85x new-customer ROAS and £36 CAC for the rest of the month; we are at 1.60x and £42 today, with CPMs rising.
| Campaign | First day | Last day | Spend | ROAS | CPA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evergreen (old Tomato vine) | 1 Aug | 8 Sep | £26,228 | 1.97x | £36 |
| Roses May 2026 | 1 Aug | 4 Sep | £4,731 | 2.57x | £30 |
| Testing | Jul 2026 | 1 Aug | 30 Aug | £4,659 | 1.70x | £41 |
| Citronella May 2026 | 1 Aug | 30 Aug | £4,629 | 2.03x | £36 |
| Orangery (Aug 2026) | 3 Aug | 19 Aug | £2,819 | 1.53x | £47 |
| Purchase | Incremental Attribution (Jul 2026) | 1 Aug | 20 Aug | £2,482 | 1.29x | £56 |
| Cook Candles | 1 Aug | 30 Aug | £2,448 | 1.91x | £37 |
| Seasalt Refresh Purchase (Jul 2026) | 1 Aug | 19 Aug | £1,637 | 0.91x | £78 |
| Sales | Hot | Retention | Subscription Opt-In | 7D Click 1D View | 1 Aug | 8 Sep | £1,475 | 4.10x | £15 |
| Testing Autumn 2026 | 2 Sep | 8 Sep | £410 | 2.38x | £26 |
Sources: Shopify orders on the KC dashboard definitions (revenue net of refunds, new customer = first-ever order, subscription = recurring tag), Meta Marketing API insights at account, campaign and ad level, Google Ads API v25, Triple Whale pixel, Recharge, and her sheet "May targets - September (2)" pulled 8 September. Working folder: clients/pott-candles/sep-1-8-review.