Lisbon, Portugal
Monserrate
Portugal, told in time.
Built the brand and paid media engine for a Portuguese luxury watch house that secured the investor funding required to move into production.
The context
Monserrate is a luxury watch brand built around Portuguese heritage — Portuguese marble dials, Manueline-inspired design, a geometric emblem drawn from a ceiling pattern in the Palácio de Monserrate in Sintra. It launched into one of the most crowded, most competitive categories in the world: a market where established Swiss houses spend more on a single campaign than most brands raise in a year.
The challenge
A new luxury watch brand has to do two things almost no startup budget can afford: justify a premium price point and build enough conviction for collectors to commit to a pre-order before the product physically exists. Online conversion alone was never going to fund production. The brand had to do the heavy lifting first.
What we did
A heritage-led brand framework.
"Portugal told in time." A position that doesn't compete with Swiss watchmaking on its own terms, but redefines what kind of luxury Monserrate offers. Anchored in a complete brand strategy: brand mapping against competitors, three buyer personas, and a brand voice — historical, elegant, proud, storytelling, warm.
A complete identity system.
Primary, secondary, and submark logos; the geometric Sintra-inspired emblem; type system, colour palette drawn from Manueline limestone and azulejo tiles, full stationery, packaging direction, and social mockups.
Founder-led storytelling.
Slow, cinematic content built around the founder speaking directly to camera. Education before conversion. Discovery-journey content that introduces collectors to the language of the brand before asking for a sale.
A blended Meta funnel.
Advantage+ Sales campaigns combining top-of-funnel awareness, mid-funnel education, and bottom-of-funnel conversion in a single architecture. Hook testing across creative variants. Audience structures spanning broad, interest-based, lookalike, and retargeting layers — built deliberately, evaluated weekly, restructured when the data demanded it.
Strategic insight delivery.
Surfacing attribution gaps between Meta and Shopify. Identifying retargeting blind spots. Prescribing the next round of creative based on objection-handling research conducted directly with prospects who hadn't yet converted.
The outcome
Monserrate has secured the investor funding required to move the brand into full production — roughly 70% of total capital required, against a luxury category where online channels typically account for around 10% of sales. The brand we built carried the conviction the round demanded. Retargeting CPMs have run as low as €3.87 against a warm audience of around 50,000 and growing. The brand is actively marketed across Portugal, the UK, and South Africa.
Takeaway
“When the product takes years to deliver, the brand has to do the heavy lifting first.”
More work
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