Stagnant Online for 7 Years. Then 1,050% Growth.

Great Southern Sunnies has been selling premium sunglasses since the 1980s. The family business had the reputation, the brands, the customer loyalty. What they didn't have was an online channel that worked. Seven years of trying. Multiple agencies. Nothing moved. Until it did.

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1,050%

Online revenue growth

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7 Years

Of stagnation broken

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6 Months

From cleanup to record months

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The Brand

40 Years of Selling Sunnies. Seven of Them Stuck Online.

Here's what makes this story different from the DTC brands you usually see in case studies. Great Southern Sunnies isn't a startup. Graeme Southwell opened his first retail sunglass store in country Victoria back in the 1980s. The business grew. More stores. Real reputation. Decades of trust. Then the sons took over and built out the online arm to bring that same experience to customers nationwide.

They're an authorised retailer for Ray-Ban, Oakley, Bolle, Arnette, Oliver Peoples, Dragon, Carrera, you name it. Free express shipping. Price match guarantee. The kind of service where Josh, the owner, will personally jump on live chat and help you pick the right pair. They've got thousands of repeat customers and reviews to match.

None of that mattered online. For seven years, the eCommerce side of the business just... sat there. Flat. Going nowhere.

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The Problem

A Previous Agency Didn't Just Fail. They Left a Mess Behind.

This is the part that'll sound painfully familiar if you've ever handed your ad accounts to the wrong people. Josh didn't just have a stagnant online business. He had a quagmire. That's his word, not ours. The previous agency had left the accounts in a state that was actively holding the business back.

Bad structure. Bad strategy. Whatever they'd been doing for however long they'd been doing it, the accounts needed to be untangled before they could be grown. And meanwhile the business is sitting at a fraction of what it should be doing online, which for a brand with this much history and this many product lines is just leaving money on the floor.

Think about that for a second. A business with 40 years of brand equity, authorised partnerships with the biggest names in eyewear, and a customer experience that genuinely beats the Sunglass Huts and Luxottica stores of the world. Flatlined online. For seven years. Because nobody could get the digital side right.

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What We Did

First: Clean Up the Mess. Then: Build Something That Actually Scales.

Matt from our team took this one personally. The first job wasn't even growth. The first job was untangling what the previous agency had done and getting the Google and Meta accounts into a state where smart decisions could actually be made.

That's the part nobody talks about and every brand at scale has experienced. You don't just "switch agencies" and watch the numbers go up. Somebody has to get in there, audit the damage, restructure the accounts, and build the foundation properly before anything meaningful can happen on top of it.

Once that was done, the real work started. Matt brought the business strategy and the campaign expertise across Google and Meta. Joel managed the whole thing to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. Between the two of them, they built an acquisition engine around a brand that had every reason to dominate online and had just never had the right people behind it.

No magic tricks. No secret hacks. Just deep understanding of the business, clean account architecture, and a strategy that respected the margins and the brand while pushing hard on growth. The boring stuff, done really well, by people who actually care about the outcome.

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The Results

1,050% Growth. In Six Months. After Seven Years of Nothing.

Let that timeline sink in. Seven years of stagnation. Six months to grow the business over ten times what it was doing before.

Same products. Same website. Same team. The only thing that changed was who was managing the strategy and the accounts. And Josh didn't just get results he was hoping for. He got results he didn't think were possible. That's a direct quote from a guy who's been in this industry for decades. Not exactly someone who gets excited easily.

"Matt has been personally helping us climb out of a quagmire caused by another agency and within six months has brought us results that we didn't expect we could ever have."

Josh Southwell, Owner of Great Southern Sunnies

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Why This Matters For You

Your Brand Might Be Bigger Than Your Numbers. And That's the Most Expensive Problem to Ignore.

GSS had everything going for it except the digital strategy. Forty years of trust. Premium product partnerships. An obsessive customer experience. And the online revenue didn't reflect any of it. For seven years. Because nobody could build the bridge between what the brand deserved and what the ad accounts were delivering.

If you're reading this and thinking "yeah, that's us" then you already know. You don't have a brand problem. You don't have a product problem. You have an execution problem. And the longer you sit with the wrong team behind your accounts, the wider the gap gets between where you are and where you should be.

Seven years is a long time to leave growth on the table. Josh will tell you that himself. The good news is it only took six months to make up for it.

"Matt's oversight, clever business strategy and mastery of Google and Meta campaigns along with Joel's careful management of it all has completely transformed our online business."

Josh Southwell, Owner of Great Southern Sunnies