How Orbitkey outcompetes massive creative studios with Atria

"To maintain performance we had to 2-3x our creative output. We were stuck competing against brands with massive creative studios. Atria shifts the odds in our favor. Now we can level up and actually compete."

Performance gains with Atria:

Faster iteration cycles: 2x faster iterations

Higher ROAS: 21%

Lower CPA: 25%

Meet the D2C brand that takes everyday organization accessories to the next level

Orbitkey makes clever accessories to organize your everyday essentials. What started in 2013 as frustration with messy, noisy keys became a Kickstarter success story that's now helping millions organize their lives with key organizers, desk mats, and tech pouches. What sets them apart is their collaboration strategy with major lifestyle brands like KonMari by Marie Kondo and entertainment giants like Disney and Star Wars. Based in Melbourne but selling worldwide, this approach means they need creative strategies as diverse as their audience segments, because as Paul Fairbrother, their media buyer, puts it: "the Star Wars audience is very different to the KonMari audience. Very, very different."

Before: Drowning in the creative arms race with insights stuck in Meta ads manager

You know that sinking feeling when you realize the game has changed and you're not keeping up? That's where Paul Fairbrother found himself. As Orbitkey's media buyer, creative strategist, and copywriter rolled into one, he'd already pushed his team to 2x-3x their creative output once. Now he needed to do it all over again.

"We know where we win now is on the creatives. It's 100% about creatives."

Paul explains. The reality was brutal: AI was flooding social feeds, and just maintaining performance meant dramatically more creative output. "Having a good media buyer is like having great defense. If you've got a garbage media buyer they can trash your account, but they're not going to unlock any kind of scaling. It's the creative side that does it."

But scaling winning creatives comes down to two things: speed of iteration and the team's ability to spot and implement learnings quickly. Both were broken at Orbitkey.

Creative inspiration meant manual, time-intensive research and lengthy explanations

When Paul found winning concepts in Meta's ad library, "trying to pass that onto a team member is quite difficult and it ends up with loads of screenshots in Slack and also just losing things."

"If you're just trying to describe in text what you're looking for from a video, it's really difficult," Paul explains. "If you can say here's like three good examples, that's when things move faster.” But without a way to organize and share those visual references, they were stuck in endless back-and-forth with designers.

The challenge got worse with Orbitkey's diverse audiences. Creating ads for Disney fans versus KonMari audiences requires completely different approaches, but Paul didn’t have a systematic way to research, save, and communicate these different creative directions.

Meanwhile, only Paul knew what was actually working

He could analyze performance and spot winning patterns, "but nobody else did." Paul had built custom reports in Meta's ads manager that worked for him, "but for a graphic designer, that's not going to make any sense of it."

"All of the creative team, they are always asking me for reports. What they don't want is a screenshot from Meta. That just means nothing."

Performance insights were trapped in formats only a media buyer could decode. 

Every creative mistake was expensive

External UGC creators form a key part of Orbitkey's creative strategy, but the economics are brutal.

"Good creators can be $300 per video plus another $100 for the product. Only one in 10 videos scale. You end up talking like $3,000-4,000 to get a successful video."

When you're hemorrhaging money on creative tests that don't work, you need every single brief to be informed by what actually drives results. But without solving the bottlenecks around research speed and sharing learnings, that 2x-3x creative scaling threatened to either burn out the team or break the budget.

The transformation: from drowning in creative demands to competing with massive studios

Paul first tried Motion to solve the analytics problem: "We've done the classic route of starting off with Motion. Fantastic product. Can't fault them. The price is very high." Then he discovered Atria: "At first, Atria was like 80-90% there for a fraction of the price. But since then, Atria has actually just improved and I would say it's better than where Motion was."

Systematic research instead of random inspiration hunting

Orbitkey now follows "about 50 plus brands" in Atria, split between Australian e-commerce brands and direct competitors. This gives Paul visibility into competitor creative volume, image versus video mix, and seasonal strategies that used to require hours of manual research.

"If any of the brands have a big sale, I copy their promotional ads to a board and that really helps me when we come to Black Friday; I've got previous sale ads I can draw on."

Instead of scrambling before major sales periods, Paul now has systematic competitive intelligence ready months in advance.

When he's developing new campaign ideas, Paul starts by searching Atria's curated ads library: "being able to search in the ad library for something that's relevant is a great place to start." No more losing creative inspiration in Slack screenshots, Paul can now create a board in Atria and then pass ad examples on to the creative team.

Visual prototypes that say 1000 words, without walls of text

Instead of trying to describe ad concepts with walls of text in Asana, Paul now gives designers visual starting points using Atria's ad cloning feature:

"Atria's image generation gets you 90% there. I'm not looking for 100%. I just give it to a designer and say, 'Right, tidy this up, apply our brand fonts, and make it perfect,' so they have a really good template to work from."

When everyone starts with the same strong visual reference, it eliminates most of the designer back-and-forth that used to eat up days. "When I can say 'here's like three good examples' rather than trying to describe a concept in text, everything goes faster."

Performance insights the whole team can actually use

Instead of screenshotting Meta reports that meant nothing to creatives, Paul quickly pulls together visual reports in Atria before team meetings. He's built insight templates that actually make sense to designers: "Building good reports in Atria and being able to go and share those before our creative meetings is really useful. Some are quite simple, like a bar chart that compares image versus video. Other times I do more in-depth creative reports by product or campaign, or I'll do video analysis reports."

The key is using the data to improve the next campaign:

"After a promotion, I can pull reports and then archive them so we've got them ready for Black Friday next year. That way we're always better than yesterday and we can easily build on what we've already learned."

But Paul discovered something unexpected: the visual reports weren't just useful, they were motivating: "People get invested in their ads. They want to know how it's going. Our partnership manager wants to know how the influencer ads are doing. And with Atria's beautiful visual reports, everyone gets the insights they need in a format they understand."

Fresh creative ideas when the well runs dry

Paul loves diving into Radar, Atria's algorithm that analyzes each creative and provides specific improvement recommendations:

"There are loads of ad libraries out there, but Radar is different because it really helps you with iteration. Sometimes you get one of those days where you're just out of new ideas. Radar is great just to dip in and look for ideas. It tells you exactly which ideas to scale, and even gives you some mockups. It's an especially great tool when I'm just not feeling as creative myself."

Strategic outcome: competing with massive studios

The transformation enabled sustainable scaling without the chaos. Paul can research competitors, generate concepts, and share performance insights in minutes instead of hours. Creative research that used to take half a day now happens during coffee breaks. Designer briefings that used to require multiple rounds of feedback now start with clear visual direction.

Most importantly, they're keeping pace with much larger competitors.

"We're competing against brands with bigger creative studios. Atria is just an easy way to level up and compete against them."

The creative infrastructure they built means their ambition, not their team size, determines their market position.

What they'd tell other brands: 'It's a no-brainer'

"We've really invested in the product. As a percentage of your media spend, Atria is a no-brainer. You're going to get benefits in so many different areas. New features are being added all the time, and we know that where we win now is on the creative, so we need all the tools we can get because we're competing against brands that are going to have bigger creative studios or creative agencies."

The impact is clear: creative research that took hours now takes minutes, designer back-and-forth eliminated, and scaling achieved without burnout. But the real win is strategic: Orbitkey built the creative infrastructure to compete with massive studios, letting their creative ambition rather than their team size determine their market position.