Fractional Marketing Case Study: KM Tools
A Creator’s Spark Drives An eComm Engine
Category || e-Commerce Woodworking Tools
Jonathan Katz-Moses has built one of the most trusted names in woodworking — not through advertising, but through obsessive craft and a YouTube channel his audience treats as gospel. That trust is rare. It's also fragile if you build the wrong machine around it.
When A+R joined KM Tools in June 2025, the marketing engine behind that trust had begun to come undone. Spend was climbing. Reporting was murky. Creative had stalled. The brand was active — but flying blind.
Our job wasn't to reinvent Jonathan. It was to build a system worthy of what he'd already created — one that turned his organic reach into a reliable paid flywheel, without bloated fees, a dozen new hires, or retrofitted generalist talent that didn't understand his world.
+11%
ROAS Improvement
2x
Media Spend
Unlocked Responsibly
+150%
Revenue Growth
Over 6 Months
+15%
Margin Improvement
The fandom was there. The system was not.
KM Tools had the asset most brands spend years trying to build: a founder with a genuine audience. Jonathan's subscribers don't follow him for deals — they follow him because he shows his work, admits his mistakes, and teaches them the things they want to learn. That's not marketing. That's trust.
But trust doesn't scale automatically. Paid media was running on autopilot — spend increasing, reporting thin, creative stale. No one was connecting marketing decisions to the economics of the business, and while the brand had a thriving content engine. it didn't have a growth system.
The first thing we did wasn't exciting. We paused underperforming campaigns, reduced spend, and cleared the noise. Efficiency improved before revenue did — and that was the point. You can't build a reliable flywheel on top of a broken foundation.
Turning organic reach into a paid flywheel, just in time for XMas
While Jonathan's name recognition is practically universal within the Woodworking YouTube community, there are a lot more hobbyists that are casual, or infrequent content consumers, which means that the majority of his potential customers haven't found him yet. Our job was to change that without compromising what made his existing audience trust him in the first place, all in time for a fourth quarter blitz.
We replaced vanity metric reporting with Net Margin as the north star. Every media decision — what to run, where to spend, when to pull back — ran through that lens. Then we rebuilt how content and paid worked together: organic posts became a creative testing ground where riskier bets were pressure tested, and the ads that ran began to build awareness and generate sales outside of the core clientele.
A six-month rolling calendar coordinated multiple product launches, cyber week and holiday promotions, organic social media, paid ad testing and deployment, and an aggressive YouTube schedule all designed to launch Katz-Moses Tools into as many shop-goers consideration set as possible.
Creative That Earned Attention
With just 8 weeks until the official start of the holidays, we delivered one of the most concentrated creative efforts we've ever executed. We produced more than 200 Q4 assets across paid Meta, paid YouTube, paid TikTok, paid search, Google Shopping, organic social, affiliate, product photography, and site video.
The creative took its cues from what Jonathan had already proven — his audience loves his raw honesty — and combined that with real shop frustrations, entertaining snippets, and product demonstrations. We repurposed his existing long-form content into platform-native formats so our paid ads arrived feeling familiar to his core audience while reaching the woodworkers who hadn't found him yet.
Cyberweek 2025 generated more than 2.5× the revenue of the prior year. Q4 as a whole delivered 3× the business of 2024 — not through inflated spend, but through tighter creative, a disciplined media strategy, and an approach that leveraged Jonathan's natural ability to connect with his audience audience as a springboard to success.
+3x
Q4 Revenue
vs. prior year
2.5x
Cyberweek revenue
vs. prior year
250+
Seasonal Assets
