The brief

Goodleaf landed a Guardian piece in early 2025 — a feature on independent pet food brands challenging the mass-market category. The week of the article: a 340% spike in traffic, a 290% spike in new customers. The month after: back to baseline. They came to us asking how to turn a moment into a model.

The diagnosis

Three problems. The landing infrastructure couldn’t capture the traffic — generic product pages, no Guardian-traffic-specific landing, no content that engaged with the values the article had highlighted. The lifecycle programme didn’t retain warm buyers any differently to cold ones. And there was no follow-up PR planned — the Guardian piece was a one-off, not the start of a programme.

The approach

This was a PR-led engagement, ran in close partnership with Ann (PR Associate). We built a “warm traffic” landing infrastructure that engaged with the brand’s values explicitly. We rebuilt the post-first-purchase lifecycle to lean into the founder story. Then we ran a six-month founder profile programme — podcasts, trade press, niche industry features. The goal was to make the founder a known commodity in independent pet nutrition.

The outcome

14 press features in six months across trade and consumer press
Founder featured on 4 podcasts including two with audiences materially aligned to Goodleaf’s buyer
Organic brand search: +480%
First-order conversion rate from PR-attributed traffic: 2.4× the site average
Lifetime first-order value from PR-attributed buyers: +31% vs paid acquisition

“The Guardian piece felt like a fluke. The work Lumos and Ann did made it the start of something. I now have a press list, a relationship with a producer at Radio 4, and a story I know how to tell. Worth every penny.”

— Eleanor Marsh, Founder, Goodleaf Pet

Surfaces involved: PR & founder profile (primary), Optimisation (warm traffic landing), Lifecycle (post-purchase rework)