Four posts a week without hiring anyone

The challenge

Northbeam Supply sells technical outdoor equipment to people who research for weeks before buying. Their audience was on Instagram and TikTok; their marketing was a product catalogue and an email list.

They had tried two things. A freelance editor, who was good and disappeared for three weeks in July. And an agency retainer quoted per campaign, which meant every post idea started with a scoping email.

The constraint that mattered: no budget for a hire, and nobody internally who could cut video.

The approach

We started with what already existed. Their warehouse team had been shooting product arrivals on a phone for two years and posting almost none of it — roughly 400 clips sitting in a shared drive.

The first month was archaeology. We cut fourteen reels out of that backlog before anyone shot anything new, which bought us the six weeks needed to build a proper capture habit.

Then we sent a shot list. Not a production plan — a laminated card by the packing bench with six shots on it and a note about lighting. That single card is responsible for more of the result than anything we designed.

By month three the workflow was: they shoot, we cut, they post. Four times a week, no meetings.

Where the brand work came in

Six months in, the content was working and the packaging was letting it down. Product arriving in a plain box after a well-shot reel is a real drop, and it showed in the unboxing content specifically.

We refreshed the identity and applied it to packaging, which moved the unboxing reels from the worst-performing format to the best.

What we would do differently

We spent the first three weeks trying to make long-form work. It did not, and the data said so by week two — we kept going because it was in the plan. On a subscription there is no reason to hold a format that is not landing. We now kill formats at two weeks.