Two of the most impressive growth stories in European eCom right now run on strategies that have close to nothing in common.

HOLY lives on lifetime value. Loop Earplugs sells a €20 product with almost no repeat business at all.

Neither of them copied a playbook. Both started from what their product allowed and built the strategy around it.

So this week, we break down what makes both brands so good:

HOLY is probably the most impressive growth case in European eCommerce of the last couple of years. I have met them pretty much at the beginning.

The easy explanation is right there. Great founders, great team, great product. I use it every single day.

But that explanation doesn't hold. Plenty of brands have a strong founding team and a product people love. None of them grows like HOLY.

Most product categories become a commodity sooner or later. Energy powder is not hard to formulate. And once your category commoditises, one of the few real advantages left is one thing:

Brand.

If you have a brand that people love, they will buy the product again, even if they can get a similar product somewhere else.

But building a brand that many people love is really hard.

So I was wondering for a while if a sound strategy is to take one working product and building several brands on top of it, so you can speak to very different people in their own language.

HOLY pulled it off with one brand.

Look at where they show up: Anime conventions. Tuning meets. Heavy metal festivals. Completely different people everywhere. But they fit in natively into almost every one of those niches - with the same brand.

The reason is the core identity. I am not sure they would phrase it the same way, but for me it is: celebrate the quirkiness inside you even if other people might find it weird.

A gamer, a car guy and a festival crowd all relate to it without HOLY becoming a different brand for each of them.

That is the moat. Not the flavour, and not the product innovation.

It is also what makes the unit economics work. HOLY does need to be incredibly profitable on the first purchase because the brand - and the product, obviously - does the work on lifetime value. That is where the money sits, and it's why they can scale profitably instead of buying growth.

Brand first, then the math follows.

Loop sells earplugs. Starting at €20, with barely any repeat business. On paper, one of the worst products you could pick if your plan is to scale.

They're doing €200m a year.

A few months ago I sat down with Jonas, who ran eCom at Loop Earplugs (a 60-80 person team), to talk about how they actually operate. And their logic isn't obvious:

Most brands try to win one big market. Loop won fifty small ones.

A €20 product with almost no reordering gives you very little margin to acquire a customer.

Every ad has to pull its weight or the math falls apart. So Loop can't run broad, generic creative and hope it lands. The ad has to be specific enough that exactly the right person stops scrolling.

That pushes them narrow. Not "people who want earplugs", but parents with young kids who can't take the noise. People in their mid-thirties who ride motorbikes and have wind-sensitive ears. Light sleepers who want rest. Festival-goers who get tinnitus easily.

Each group gets its own angle, its own ad, its own reason to buy.

Being this specific makes CPMs drop, CTR climb, and conversion going up. The narrower the message, the cheaper the attention and the better it converts.

Loop went into the niches out of necessity, and that was their way to make the numbers work.

Winning one niche only does not take you so far, though. So they stack them:

The operating rule underneath it stays simple: hit your profitability target, then spend as hard as you can behind whatever clears it.

Of course, scaling 50+ use cases across 20+ channels only holds together with a proper reporting and measurement setup underneath.

Loop uses Klar to know what channel and use case is actually working, cutting what isn't, and constantly validating those numbers with geo-lift tests along the way.

This is how you grow into a €200m business with a €20 product.

Three things to take away from this: