How 🇳🇱 Dutch outdoor brand Foxelli competes against Salomon and Merrell — without a single photoshoot

Outdoor footwear is a visually demanding category. Salomon runs campaigns shot on alpine ridgelines. Merrell partners with professional athletes. Columbia produces full seasonal lookbooks with film crews. The bar for creative in outdoor gear is high — and it's set by brands with creative budgets that most independent labels will never reach.

Foxelli built a loyal customer base across the Netherlands and Europe by making high-performance outdoor footwear accessible — boots and shoes designed for real trails, not just Instagram. But as they scaled their paid media ambitions, a familiar problem emerged: great creative required great production. And great production meant expensive location shoots, freelance photographers, post-production timelines, and still ending up with 8 to 10 final assets from a shoot that cost thousands of euros to run.

As a 🇳🇱 Dutch brand competing across the EU and beyond, they also needed creative that could serve multiple markets — different languages, different seasonal timing, different product angles. Producing even a basic A/B test across German, French, and Dutch audiences meant multiplying their production workload by three. At their existing pace, creative had become the primary constraint on how fast they could scale.

A typical outdoor campaign cycle looked like this: plan the shoot two months out, book a location, hire a photographer and model, wait for weather to cooperate, shoot, edit, retouch, reformat for placements, translate copy, review — and arrive in the ad account with a handful of variants and a two-month-old creative brief. By the time the ads launched, the window for the relevant season was already narrowing.

“We were producing maybe 10 creatives per season. The big outdoor brands we compete with are testing 100 a month. We knew the algorithm favoured whoever gave it more to work with — we just couldn't keep up at that pace without spending more on production than we were spending on media.”

— Foxelli Team

The maths were brutal. To produce creative at the volume serious paid social testing requires, Foxelli would need to either dramatically increase their shoot budget or find a completely different production model. They needed a way to generate high-quality, on-brand outdoor ad creative at scale — without booking another mountain location.

The first change was volume. This 🇳🇱 Dutch outdoor brand went from 10 creatives per season — gated by a single location shoot — to 60 launch-ready ads per week generated from their existing product pages. The algorithm finally had what it needed to properly test and scale.

The second change was speed. Foxelli's seasonal campaigns had always launched late because the creative had to be planned and shot months in advance. Now they could spin up creative for a new product or market angle the same day the idea emerged — and have it live in Meta before their competitors had even started briefing a photographer.

The third change was CPA. With 60 variants in rotation instead of two, Meta had enough material to find and favour the winning angles. Across their European campaigns, Foxelli dropped average CPA by 34% in their first 30 days on PotionAds — not by changing their targeting, but simply by giving the algorithm enough creative to do its job properly.