We've been heads down for 13 years.
Time to talk.
ADFIX has been in business since 2013. In all that time, we never seriously marketed ourselves. No content, no newsletter, barely a social presence. We were heads down, working on client projects, and our growth came from referrals and results.
That was a choice, and I don't regret it. But it means thirteen years of lessons what actually grows a DTC brand, what quietly kills one are sitting in our heads and our dashboards instead of being useful to anyone else.
So we're changing that. We're going to share what we know: educational content, our worldview, the actual frameworks we use with clients. Not a brochure. This first piece is the honest version of who we are and how we got here including the failure that started it all.
Paid in furniture
I got introduced to the web in high school. I liked gaming and wanted to make a game; a family friend told me about HTML, and I went down the rabbit hole.
My first real project was a presentation website for a furniture company in my hometown. They paid me in furniture which is how I furnished my first proper "office."
More websites followed, and then commerce pulled me in. I sourced memory sticks and MP3 players, sold them wholesale, then started selling online through a store I custom-coded myself from w3schools tutorials. Advertising and technology, always both. That combination never let go of me.
ADFIX started with a failure
Here's the part agencies usually leave out of their About page: ADFIX exists because my own business died.
My commerce business ran out of product. I didn't have the funds or access to capital to finance larger inventories. The demand was there; the operation behind it wasn't. That distinction, between a marketing problem and a business problem, would end up defining everything we do. But at the time it was just a company I'd built, gone.
So I took what I'd learned and decided to apply it for others. I started with small freelance jobs, just to earn my chops. One early client, who ran a store himself, began building websites for people in his network and proposed referring me the clients he launched, for a commission. That was our first pipeline.
What I found in those early Google Ads days surprised me: the industry was a mess. Incorrect setups everywhere, money being spent with no chance of success in sight. Nobody was minding the store.
I moved to Brașov after finishing my studies a nice mountain town, and I wanted to learn how to ski. The company was founded in 2013. I was doing more and more of this work, and loving it.
The build
For a while I ran everything solo: three projects, roughly $20k in combined budgets. Manageable, but time-hungry. Then one of those clients a company that had just raised significant funding wanted to ramp up fast, including on social. I tapped a cousin for help and trained him from scratch. That's how ADFIX's team started: not a hiring plan, but client demand pulling us forward.
That pattern repeated for a decade. We added Meta Ads in 2015, dedicated Facebook specialists in 2018, Amazon in 2019, TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest in 2020, creative production and CRM in 2024. Every expansion happened because the work demanded it, not because a service menu needed filling.
Along the way, a handful of engagements changed what ADFIX is:
Notice what those stories have in common: almost none of them are just an "ads" story. That's not an accident. More on that below.
The hard parts
Early 2020, when the lockdowns began, was the closest call. Clients shut down operations, cancelled engagements, retreated into their shells. We watched retainers disappear in weeks. The clients who held course eventually doubled down and then the lockdowns pushed everyone online, and demand for ecommerce exploded. But the boom came after the scare, and I haven't forgotten the order.
The other hard lessons came from watching good brands get hurt from the inside. One brand we worked with was acquired by rookie investors who arrived making sweeping changes without understanding the reality on the ground. Over the years we've been through many management changes on the client side, and the pattern is consistent: the leaders who succeeded were the ones who asked questions, made a real effort to understand, and kept an actual dialogue going. The ones who failed came in with big egos, checked boxes, and didn't listen. If you're a founder taking on management or investors, that's the filter I'd give you.
What thirteen years taught us
We've seen a lot of brands succeed and, honestly, a lot of brands fail including brands that did real things right. High-potential founders and sharp managers, blindsided by what they didn't know. Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. In ecommerce, the punch almost always lands at a point of failure you weren't watching.
What good is great creative if your checkout is broken, your product is out of stock, your landing page confuses people, or your shipping costs and delivery times scare buyers off at the last step? And the mirror image is just as brutal: a great product, operations dialed in, maybe even product-market fit in retail and it goes nowhere because it's not being presented right.
Most failing brands don't lack effort.
They lack a map.
Most failing brands don't lack effort. They lack a map. Three beliefs came out of watching this for thirteen years, and they're the foundation of everything ADFIX does.
01 Growth isn't a project to complete. It's a function to operate. +
The mess I found in those early Google Ads accounts bad setups burning money was the project mindset in action: set it up once, badly, and walk away.
But the sharpest version of this lesson is about inventory, not ads. One of our clients was growing, profitably until he got trigger-happy ordering his next production run and overbought. Once production was paid for, the business was cash-starved, and we had to hit the brakes on growth so he could survive the crunch. We've seen the exact opposite too: brands falling behind on ordering, stocking out, stalling their growth and worst of all damaging their brand. Same root cause in both directions: no forecast, nobody paying attention to the big picture.
Meanwhile, the brands that knew their margins and had demand planning figured out with inputs from finance, purchasing and marketing turned into the big success stories. Growth needs an operator, permanently. That's also why one client who hired us "just for ads" ended up, years later, having us run their entire marketing: the work never finishes, it evolves.
02 Acquisition, creative, retention and ecommerce are one commercial function. Operate them together. +
I learned this by losing my own company to it the demand was fine; the inventory and capital weren't. And then I watched the same failure repeat in brand after brand we audited, always in the same place: the seams between roles.
A brand invests heavily in creative, hands it to the media buyer who sends all the traffic to the homepage instead of a curated page that would actually convert. A great ad and a great offer point to the right landing page but nobody was watching the product order in the collection, and the stellar offer is buried on page two where no one will find it. A big launch gets an elaborate email series, great content, careful segmentation but the website doesn't signal the launch, and neither do the ads. The social team spots comments flagging a website issue, emails it in and it dies in someone's swamped inbox while the conversion killer sits live.
None of these are incompetence. It wasn't the media buyer's job to check landing pages every day. The marketing manager never told the website manager a big campaign was coming. Every one is a handoff nobody owned. When acquisition, creative, retention and the store are run as separate silos, the failures live in the gaps between them which is exactly why we refuse to run just one silo.
03 Autopilot kills accounts. Active senior ownership is the alternative. +
In early 2020, what separated the clients who doubled down from the ones who retreated wasn't budget. It was having partners actively in the account watching, adjusting, arguing instead of a set-and-forget vendor. And it's the same trait I mentioned in the leaders who survived management changes: ask questions, seek to understand, keep the dialogue going. Active ownership is the same behavior on both sides of a working engagement.
Our clients tell us the thing they actually bought wasn't campaigns it was attention. Someone with the expertise to run their operations and marketing channels, who doesn't show up with cookie-cutter techniques, and who helps them see where to prioritize their resources against the outcomes they want. We piece the puzzle together.
Who we are today
ADFIX is the embedded growth team for founder-led DTC brands doing $3M-$10M online.
One team, the whole growth function: acquisition, creative, retention and ecommerce operated as one commercial function.
We understand your products, your market, your business needs. We work with you to develop the goals and translate them down to the most granular level through tailored strategies. Then we monitor the campaigns, the website, the tracking, the integrations, the product data, conversion rate, AOV, customer retention.
We are a team of 20 people based in Europe, working remotely in English, French and Romanian. We deliberately keep a limited roster so senior people remain closely involved as your business evolves, active senior ownership instead of autopilot. Collectively, the team carries dozens of years of experience across every part of the function.
We're partners, not vendors. Profitability is the standard, and we think in years, not quarters most of the stories above span multiple years with the same brands.
Where this is going
GMV generated annually
60 long-term brand partnerships x $5M average annual sales
We've set ourselves a ten-figure ambition: 60 long-term brand partnerships, each averaging $5M in annual sales roughly $300M in GMV generated every year through brands we operate with. Not sixty logos on a slide; sixty relationships like the ones in this story, where we're still in the account years later.
And starting now, we're doing the thing we told every client to do and never did ourselves: showing up consistently, in public. We'll open-source the process the frameworks, the teardowns, the numbers with their context. Person-led, educational first.
We've been heads down for thirteen years. Here's everything we learned.