Barker and Stonehouse sofa in living room

Barker & Stonehouse: Paid media

How aligning paid media with real-time inventory and warehouse strategy delivered significant revenue growth for Barker & Stonehouse.

Barker & Stonehouse didn’t need a standard media plan; they needed a strategy synced with warehouse realities and stock cycles. By building a live feedback loop between product availability and our paid media strategy, we turned inventory pressure into a revenue engine.

Our approach delivered 58% revenue growth and a 50% ROAS increase over six months, proving the impact aligning paid media with genuine business needs. Exactly the kind of commercial edge we strive to create for our clients.

Client

BarkerandStonehouse

Service

  • Paid Media
  • Paid Social

Year

2025
58 %

Revenue increase

50 %

ROAS increase

147 %

Performance Max revenue uplift

Barker and Stonehouse are a leading independent, family-run British furniture retailer founded in 1946 by Charles Barker and Alex Stonehouse. Headquartered in Stockton-on-Tees, the company has grown from a single post-war storefront into a national brand with 19 stores across the UK. 

They specialise in high-quality, sustainably sourced home furnishings (ranging from sofas and beds to designer brands like Ercol and Timothy Oulton) and were the first UK furniture retailer of their type to achieve Carbon Neutral Plus status. 

BS Website Mockup

The challenge for Barker & Stonehouse was a classic case of operational friction stalling commercial growth. 

In 2025, they set off on a journey to refine operational agility to better support their long-term trajectory. Prioritising three key pillars of optimisation: 

  • Inventory fluidity. 
  • Supply chain precision. 
  • Market adaptability. 

The brief to connective3 was twofold: deliver ambitious year-on-year revenue growth while positioning Barker & Stonehouse as a premium digital brand challenging the market leaders.  

With an abundant inventory ready for market, certain categories faced stifling lead times. Paid media had to do more than drive sales; it had to relieve stock pressure while keeping revenue and ROAS on target. 

  • BS Website Mockup
Barker and stonehouse web search

The strategy

The insight was clear. Not all SKUs were equal. While some products were natural bestsellers, others were clogging warehouses. In-stock items converted at 229% higher ROAS than back-order products. This insight shifted our strategy:  

barker and stonehouse furniture

Prioritising high-stock SKUs

We worked with product teams to first & foremost promote SKUs with the greatest stock volumes or warehousing pressure.  

Focusing on profitable regions

We targeted users within 20 miles of stores, but also used CRM data to identify high-value regions nationwide (outside of store radius’). 

Feeding the algorithms with stronger signals

We built custom labels for lead times and stock status so platforms optimised against true availability, not just easy wins.

Leveraging first-party data

We segmented audiences by lifetime value, purchase behaviour, and promo sensitivity to align overstocked items with the right buyer profiles.  

This was about aligning paid media algorithms to business reality to drive revenue with stock and signal driven strategy.  

barker and stonehouse ad

The execution

We used the brand’s own data to make smarter decisions by: 

  • Identifying the most valuable previous customers, and feeding these to the algorithms to find new customers demonstrating similar behaviours. 
  • Re-engaging lapsed customers who hadn’t bought anything in over a year and showed them new collections to get them interested again. 
  • Creating a custom shopping feed to prioritise items that were in stock and ready to ship. 

Creatively, we reframed urgency and reassurance. Lifestyle assets carried the premium look and feel the brand is known for, but the message architecture pushed service reality to the fore, “ready to go,” “in stock now,” and clear delivery expectations to counter consumer impatience. 

Finally, we expanded Performance Max from initial testing into every category. This reduced reliance on declining search volumes by opening inventory to broader placements and intent signals, giving high-stock SKUs more ways to be discovered without sacrificing efficiency. 

The results

Our approach delivered significant results over six months, proving the impact aligning paid media with genuine business needs. Exactly the kind of commercial edge we strive to create for our clients:

58 %

revenue increase

50 %

ROAS increase

147 %

PMax revenue uplift

“Our relationship with C3 continues to go from strength to strength and this is a great example why. Their smart approach and relentless focus on performance has helped us turn challenges into opportunities to power ecomm growth.”

Dan Lawrence, Head of Digital & E-Commerce, Barker & Stonehouse

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