Princess Polly

Background

Princess Polly is a leading online fashion retailer popular with trend-driven Australian consumers and rapidly expanding its presence in the United States. The brand is a leading destination for apparel and accessories inspired by current fashion trends, street style, and pop culture.

Princess Polly has a strong organic presence on TikTok, using the platform to engage its core Gen Z audience through trend-led styling videos, outfit inspiration, and creator collaborations. Their content blends fashion, humour, and native features, reflecting the brand’s youth-driven identity and reinforcing its position as a style authority across both Australia and the US.

An early adopter of ad formats to optimise paid activity, Princess Polly has achieved strong performance through their Web Conversions and Smart+ campaigns. As the brand continues to grow in the US, its marketing focus is on positioning Princess Polly as a go-to fashion destination, helping shoppers discover on-trend looks for every occasion, including key local seasonal moments such as Fall.

Solution

To build on the strong results unlocked through previous Smart+ campaigns, Princess Polly aimed to assess how the upgraded Smart+ experience and Catalog Ads could further enhance performance across its growing global footprint, with a focus on the US market.

With Smart+, TikTok’s machine learning automatically optimises targeting, creative delivery, and bidding to reach high-intent shoppers. Catalog Ads adds an extra layer of personalisation by matching users with real-time product availability and pricing, creating a seamless path to purchase. The pairing of Smart+ and Catalog Ads was therefore hypothesised to drive greater efficiency, scale conversion volume, and deliver stronger returns by automatically matching the right products to the right audiences.

To test performance, the brand conducted an A/B split comparing Smart+ Catalog against a Smart+ Web Conversions campaign. The test leveraged a mix of video and catalog carousel creatives designed to reflect Princess Polly’s trend-driven identity and showcase products aligned with culture, fashion, and on-platform community conversations.

To reinforce the campaign’s key message and position Princess Polly as a go-to fashion destination in the US, helping shoppers find on-trend looks for every occasion, the campaign creative centred on the key local Fall seasonal moment. The brand supported this creative through Fall-themed creator videos that showcased the brand’s range of party and occasion wear.

Finally, by leveraging Audience Suggestions, Smart+ refined targeting in real time based on performance data, ensuring the campaign reached users most likely to engage and convert. This balance of automation and guided optimisation also enabled Princess Polly to efficiently prospect for new customers and scale performance in the US market.

Results

The Smart+ catalog campaign exceeded expectations and outperformed the Manual Web Conversions campaign, increasing sales volume by 5X whilst simultaneously slashing acquisition (CPA) costs by 80%.

While creator content helped reinforce brand storytelling and align with the Fall seasonal moment, performance was overwhelmingly driven by the Catalogue Carousel, which dynamically showcased products and matched them to high-intent shoppers in real time. This format delivered the strongest engagement and commercial impact, driving a 413% higher ROAS and validating the strategic focus on automation and product-level personalisation through Smart+.

The combination of TikTok’s automated Smart+ technology with product-level personalisation through Catalogue Ads, created a seamless experience from discovery to purchase. This approach allowed Princess Polly to efficiently reach new audiences, drive incremental sales, and scale performance beyond what was achievable with Web Conversions alone.