The Challenge

As Q4 approached, the busiest shopping season of the year, Wolf & Badger faced a familiar marketplace challenge: how to help their independent fashion and lifestyle brands increase visibility while preserving the curated, discovery-led experience customers expect.

Brands wanted premium placements across search, category, and product details pages, but many lacked the time, expertise, or budget to manage complex advertising strategies. Wolf & Badger saw retail media as a way to support brand growth, but not by turning visibility into a pay-to-win model. The right solution had to align with their core principle: creating a retail experience that is fair and frictionless for everyone.

The Solution

Wolf & Badger partnered with Topsort to launch retail media, while maintaining control over how ads were ranked and surfaced within the marketplace. Rather than layering ads onto existing pages, the two teams focused on building a modern auction system designed to scale monetization without disrupting the discovery experience.

At its core was Topsort's second-price auction, enabling brands to bid for sponsored placements while paying only what was necessary to win, encouraging participation without favoring larger budgets. Topsort blended its own predicted performance scoring with Wolf & Badger’s existing signals, such as predicted conversion, popularity, and profitability, to produce a unified quality scoring framework used directly in the auctions, where listings were ranked using bid value alongside relevance.

The auction was paired with a streamlined onboarding approach that made participation immediately accessible. Wolf & Badger set up initial account balances and baseline campaigns for brands first launching retail media, then transitioned control for self-service management and optimization. This allowed brands of all sizes to begin advertising without prior expertise, while gathering performance data to inform future campaign decisions. This supported setup enabled Wolf & Badger to scale brand participation efficiently while maintaining program quality.

"Integration has been seamless, and the Topsort team helped us build a solution that lets brands reach the right shoppers while preserving our curated marketplace," the Wolf & Badger team shared.

The result was sponsored placements that felt native to the experience–competitive in the auction, genuinely relevant to shoppers, and supportive of smaller brands.

The Results

In the first six months, Wolf & Badger proved that retail media could scale quickly while staying true to marketplace values and driving meaningful revenue for independent brands.

The retail media program generated £1.3 million (1.7 million USD) in attributed revenue, with more than 800 brands actively running campaigns.

"The platform's ease of use meant we could get started quickly, and early access to premium inventory helped us optimize ahead of peak season," the Wolf & Badger team noted.

​​This accessibility drove consistent, profitable performance, with an average ROAS of 3.9x across all active campaigns and individual brands exceeding 7.5x. For another independent seller, the real-world impact was even more significant: they saw such an immediate surge in demand that they sold out of inventory and had to scale back their campaigns to keep pace with production."

Ultimately, this success proved that a relevance-first auction design allows smaller brands to compete, and win, based on product fit rather than budget size.

What’s Next

Wolf & Badger’s retail media program shows what’s possible when performance and marketplace values are designed together from day one. The team created a system where independent brands can participate meaningfully, while shoppers continue to discover products they genuinely love.

With a proven foundation in place, and shopper trust maintained, Wolf & Badger now has the flexibility to scale retail media as a sustainable growth engine. As they expand self-serve access, explore new ad formats, and iterate using Topsort's experimentation framework, they're building a model where retail media revenue grows alongside, not at the expense of, the brand and shopper experience. What began as a rapid Q4 launch has evolved into a long-term retail media capability that strengthens the entire ecosystem: brands, customers, and the marketplace alike.