How can DTC creative operations keep up with business growth (without exploding costs)?

‍Three and a half months in, The Longevity Store was moving fast. Italy was outperforming expectations, expansion to Germany was next, to be followed by the Netherlands, then the US. Tom van der Kolk had a plan to become Europe’s largest longevity brand by the end of 2026, and to achieve this ambitious goal they also needed to produce large amounts of localized creative. It also meant that the creative operation needed to keep scaling with the business, but without compromising margins.

They had created a setup that should scale. It looked logical on paper: Google Drive had been cleaned up with folders organised by type, agency, creator and language. But when put into practice at their scale, the problems were starting to show. 

15 people spread across time zones, including editors, a creative strategist, media buyers and three external agencies, were accessing files and uploading material daily. This was causing errors, unnecessary back and forth, and naming conventions not being followed. Every new market added another layer of content with no system to hold it together.

Trouble finding the right assets was only part of the problem. The deeper issue showed up every time someone tried to push an ad live: information required to launch an ad lived in multiple places, across text docs, Drive and spreadsheets, and was often hard to find.
"Copy lived in Google Docs, assets in Drive, ad naming in someone's head. Every launch meant rebuilding the same fields three times. Translations were scattered across separate sheets per market. And we had no shared view of what was a tested winner, what was being translated, and what was actually ready to ship."

- Tom van der Kolk, Co-founder, The Longevity Store

Tom knew he needed a better solution if he wanted to keep the creative operation scaling with the business, but he simply couldn’t continue hiring more employees or onboarding new agencies. That’s when he decided to look into Focal.

From chaos to a creative operating layer

Tom describes what Focal became for the team this way: "For us, Focal is the operating layer between creative production and ad launching. It’s the single source of truth for copy, asset naming, translations, and Meta ad fields. Focal cuts out the back and forth between Drive, Google Docs, and Ads Manager that eats most teams alive."

Easy translation tracking for winning ads

The workflow that was most labor intensive, translating winning ads into new markets, now runs as a status pipeline. When an ad is confirmed as a winner, it’s automatically flagged for translation and everyone can see the localization status of each winner across every market at any moment.

"Translation status flow is second only to AI autofill. It removes the single biggest bottleneck for a multi-market brand." 

- Tom van der Kolk, Co-founder, The Longevity Store

AI Autofill for ad copy and localization

Focal’s AI Autofill helps The Longevity Store write ad copy and localize assets easily. Every asset uploaded to Focal gets an AI Summary: a structured analysis of what the creative contains, who it's aimed at and what the hook is. That summary feeds the Meta ad copy fields directly, generating copy in multiple languages. It also ensures everything follows The Longevity Store's brand voice precisely.

"AI autofill on the Meta copy fields is a big benefit. Because it uses the AI Summary as the generative ‘brain’, the AI can write in our brand voice much better, and does not sound like generic AI garbage”, Tom mentions. 

AI automation organizes assets and keeps everything discoverable

Drive automation handles the asset filing. When an ad is approved, it lands in the correct Drive folder automatically and is pushed to ad platforms. Nobody needs to do manual downloads or re-uploads, or know where a specific version went.

Focal’s AI also analyzes and tags all creatives, making The Longevity Store’s thousands of assets searchable by more than just filenames: visual contents, video frames, media properties and more. This ensures that finding any creative, such as a past winner for a seasonal campaign, happens in seconds, without anyone needing to dig around on Google Drive based on filenames.

A creative process structured around Boards

The Longevity Store structured their creative process around Focal’s Creative Boards. Each board has its own views with relevant information per role: editors, producers, media buyers and creative agency partners see only what's relevant to each of them.

Result: A truly scalable creative operation, time spent on translations and copy cut by 60%, creative volume up 4x

The biggest business benefit from taking Focal into use has been that the creative operations are truly scalable now, able to keep up with business growth, and so cost-effectively.

“We’ve achieved impressive results so far, and have ambitious growth plans for the business in the future. Without Focal, they would not have been possible.”

-Tom van der Kolk, Co-Founder, The Longevity Store 

After onboarding Focal, the efficiency gains have been considerable. 

• Copy preparation time per ad is down by roughly half since AI autofill came online.
• Translation cycle time has dropped from around a week to a couple of days per market.
• The Longevity Store now comfortably ships roughly 3-4 times more concept variations per two-week sprint, a volume that would have been a stretch before. Each concept is also localized across markets.

"We cut copy prep time per ad by roughly half. We comfortably ship 20-40+ concept variations per two-week sprint, which would have been a stretch before. Translation cycle time has also gone from around a week to a couple of days."

-Tom van der Kolk, Co-founder, The Longevity Store 

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New team members get up to speed faster. The board structure itself carries most of the onboarding: what's in production, what's approved, what's being translated, what's ready to launch is visible to anyone who opens it. According to Tom, "the structure does most of the explaining now."

The other thing that has changed is what the team is actually spending time on. Before Focal, a significant chunk of every sprint went toward administrative rebuilding: re-entering copy fields, organising translations in separate sheets, tracking which winners were live in which markets. That work still exists, but it no longer requires the same hands-on effort.

Focal is now an important piece of the puzzle as The Longevity Store continues their ambitious international expansion plan.