Clove
Client story · Valentte

How Valentte found £3,000 a day.

A £25M home fragrance brand, spending up to £25,000 a day on ads, whose dashboards and bank account were telling two different stories. This is what closing that gap looked like.

The situation

Luke Bream had grown Valentte 50× in five years — one of the UK's fastest-growing home fragrance brands, built substantially on paid advertising. By every platform metric, the machine was working. And yet:

"We could see from a cash perspective that there were problems with profitability, but inside the metrics we were looking at, it didn't look like they were.

The frustration was the mismatch between those two things."

He'd studied what the best companies in the world do. He'd rebuilt the reporting more than once. The mismatch stayed.

"It's like standing on quicksand… the data had to be rock solid in order to make the right decisions, and I hadn't got that right."

Luke Bream · CEO, Valentte

The audit

One sprint on Valentte's real numbers — orders, product costs, shipping, fees, fulfillment, and every pound of ad spend — rebuilt from the ground up into what customers were actually worth, what they actually cost, and how long the cash was out the door.

The diagnosis: Valentte's new-customer cohorts were losing roughly £1,600 a day — invisible inside platform metrics, unmistakable in contribution terms. The fix wasn't spending less everywhere; it was a CAC ceiling: the maximum worth paying for a customer, derived from what customers actually return, with campaign-by-campaign guidance against it.

"You gave us targets now for acquisition costs that we shouldn't go above."

What changed — in three days

Valentte's team acted on the guidance immediately. Three days later, the same cohorts that had been losing £1,600 a day were making £1,400 a day — a measured swing of more than £3,000 a day. Measured, not projected: the same math that found the leak confirmed the recovery.

Before the audit
−£1,600/day
Three days after
+£1,400/day
Measured swing
£3,000+/day

The projection belongs to Luke, on camera:

"Translate that over a year… £1.1 million pounds difference it will make to our bottom line, just that single change."

Valentte testimonial — the numbers, in 16 seconds
0:16

What it changed for him

Valentte testimonial — the story, in 2 minutes
2:12

"It feels a little bit like a magic trick — there you are. Oh my god, that's what the real numbers are."

"It has been a life-changing process for me as a chief executive and a founder."

"I will not approach marketing or advertising in the same way ever again."

Luke Bream · CEO, Valentte

What's next

The work continues in the Clove Partnership: Valentte runs on Clove — their profit and advertising source of truth — every day, and the target Luke named is still ahead:

"There is still another £2,000 to £3,000 a day of improvement if we get to the target that you set us."

Talk to Luke

Luke has offered to take reference calls from founders considering Clove. If hearing it directly would help, ask me for an introduction: hello@cloveanalytics.com.

The full conversation

Prefer it unedited? The complete interview — trimmed only for pauses — is here.

The full conversation with Luke Bream
7:33

If your dashboards and your bank account are telling two different stories, the audit is where it starts.

The audit