How does a product launch agency work? It takes a product through three phases in a fixed order, with one team holding the plan, the creative, the channels and the calendar. Build engineers the launch before anything is public: positioning, pricing, a pre-launch audience, the launch page, the video and tested ad creative.
Launch is 30 to 45 days of coordinated execution across paid media, PR, influencers and email. Grow turns the launch spike into a business through the store, lifecycle email, retention and new markets.
Blazon Agency calls this Build, Launch, Grow, and has run it across 500+ product launches since 2016, for first-time founders, for corporate teams at companies such as Xiaomi and Absolut, and for Pillo Health, later acquired by Stanley Black & Decker.
Here is how Blazon runs it, from the first call to the growth work two years later, with a real case at each stage.
What a launch agency actually does
A launch agency is hired to own a date. A PR firm owns press coverage, a production studio owns the film and a performance agency owns ad spend, usually after the product ships.
The launch agency owns the order in which all of those things happen, and it is judged on what the launch produces rather than on any single asset.
Launches rarely fail because nobody made a video. They fail because the video was finished before the positioning was decided, the ads went live to strangers instead of a warmed list, or the press landed a week after the money was spent.
As a product launch agency, Blazon runs strategy, the pre-launch audience, the launch itself, PR, paid media, brand and the Shopify store as one engagement. The difference from a design-led brand project is in what a brand launch agency does, and each workstream is broken down in product launch services.
Before any work starts: from first call to kickoff
Every Blazon engagement starts with a 30-minute strategy call to test fit: the product, its stage, the goal and whether the numbers can support it. If there is a fit, a 60-minute scoping call follows, then a written proposal with deliverables and a timeline within five business days.
Kickoff lands within two weeks of signature, about three weeks after the first call.
Most briefs stop at the first call. Blazon takes on roughly one in five of the products that approach it, and when the audience cannot be built or the goal cannot be supported, the founder hears it before a contract.
That filter is the first piece of launch work. A launch that cannot close its own arithmetic at scoping will not close it in the live window either.
Who is on the team
Every engagement has two named people from day one. A strategy lead with ten or more years of launches owns the plan, the positioning and the commercial targets. A campaign manager runs the calendar day to day across every channel.
Around them sit the specialists the scope needs. A creative director owns the visual system and video direction. A paid media lead buys across Meta, Google and TikTok and runs the creative testing.
An email lead owns the Klaviyo flows and SMS, a PR lead runs press and embargoes, a Shopify developer builds the store, and a producer handles delivery and reporting.
There is no junior account-manager layer and no handoff between the people who write the strategy and the people who execute it. The client gets a shared channel with the team and a reporting cadence agreed at kickoff.
Where a client has in-house marketing, the team takes the channels with gaps and trains staff to take them back.
Build, Launch, Grow at a glance
| Phase | How long | What happens | Ends with | Case in point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build | 6 to 24 weeks | Research, positioning, pricing, pre-launch store, deposit or waitlist funnel, launch page, video, pre-tested ad creative, PR embargo briefings | A launch-readiness decision | Pillo Health: 40,000-person pre-launch list |
| Launch | 30 to 45 days | Coordinated go-live across the store, paid media, PR, influencers and email, tracked on a daily dashboard | A decision on where to scale | Filippo Loreti: $5.1M in its first 30 days |
| Grow | 12 to 24+ months | Shopify DTC, post-launch pre-orders, paid acquisition scaled against return on ad spend, lifecycle email, retention, new products and markets | A business that compounds | Homethings: 25,000+ active subscribers |
Engagements come in two shapes. A project covers a fixed scope over three to six months, such as a single-channel launch or a defined Build phase.
A full-service launch runs all three phases over nine to 18 months, the shape used for flagship hardware, consumer tech and health tech. Both are laid out phase by phase on How We Work.
Build: the launch is engineered before it is public
Build is the longest phase and the one where most of the outcome is decided. It starts with research into who the buyer actually is and ends with a one-sentence articulation of why the product matters.
Pricing comes next. That means engineering the launch price, the early offers and the tiers, so the price turns into a commercial model that funds the launch and still works after it.
Then the audience gets built before the product can be bought. A Shopify pre-launch store goes live to capture early demand, and a waitlist or deposit funnel turns ad traffic into people who have already made a small decision.
Blazon runs this on what founder Michael Raven calls the Deposit Test: someone who will not put down $1 before launch will not put down $200 on launch day. In Blazon's launches, deposit holders convert at 20 to 40 percent, against 1 to 3 percent for an ordinary email list. That gap is why every launch target Blazon sets comes from the deposit-backed list rather than from a hope.
The creative is made in Build, not in Launch. The video gets shot, the launch page is designed around conversion rather than looks, and the ad creative is produced and tested on cold traffic so paid media is already proven on day one.
PR embargo targets are briefed six to eight weeks before go-live, and influencer partnerships are contracted. The phase ends with a launch-readiness decision. If the pre-launch numbers do not support the goal, the goal or the date moves, not the budget.
Case in point: Pillo Health (Stanley Black & Decker). Pillo is a home-health robot that helps people manage their medication, a new kind of household device with no reference point for the buyer. Blazon built the launch story around the three questions any new category has to answer fast: what is it, where does it fit in my day, and why should I care.
Blazon grew the pre-launch list to 40,000 qualified emails before launch. Pillo went on to $2.5M in sales, 15,000+ units pre-ordered and 120+ press features, and was later acquired by Stanley Black & Decker (Pillo Health case study).
Case in point: JAYE. For JAYE, a wearable that nudges rather than notifies, Build meant the brand identity, the Shopify store and the launch emails built as one reservation flow. A visitor meets the idea, understands the product and reserves it, and every email after that speaks to whether they are still curious or already committed (JAYE case study).
The first 90 days, week by week
For a full-service launch, the first 13 weeks follow a set rhythm. It flexes with the product, especially hardware, where tooling and certification set the date, but the order does not change.
Week 1 is kickoff: a strategy session, a positioning session, and access set up across paid media, email, Shopify and analytics.
Weeks 2 and 3 lock the strategy: positioning document delivered, creative direction agreed, launch page outlined, video script approved and PR target list signed off.
Weeks 4 and 5 put the pre-launch live. The Shopify pre-launch store, the waitlist funnel and the email welcome flow ship while ad creative is in production.
Weeks 6 and 7 are testing. Paid campaigns run on cold traffic to test creative, landing pages are A/B tested, and a baseline customer acquisition cost is set.
Weeks 8 and 9 are finals: launch page finished, video rough cut approved, PR embargo briefings started and influencers seeded. Weeks 10 to 13 are the launch itself, with assets locked, budgets approved and every channel activating in sequence.
Week 6 is what separates this from most launch plans. By launch day the creative has been tested against strangers and acquisition cost is a measured number, not a guess. Teams running a launch themselves can plan the same sequence with the product launch timeline guide.
Launch: 30 to 45 days on one calendar
Launch day arrives with the audience built, the launch page approved, the ad account ready, embargoes set to lift and email sequences scheduled. Blazon calls this window the Launch Moment: the point where a product goes from invisible to visible, and attention is cheapest because the product is news.
The first 48 hours decide the trajectory. In DTC, early conversion proves the paid funnel and unlocks budget, and early sales give the press a number to report. On Product Hunt, the first hour of upvotes sets the momentum for the rest of the day.
After that the work is daily. A dashboard tracks revenue, acquisition cost and sentiment, and paid media scales against real return on ad spend with creative rotated daily.
Tier-one and tier-two press land on embargo, and influencer activations fire in a pre-briefed sequence. Customers who ordered early get regular updates, and offers are timed against sales pace. The phase ends with a decision on where to scale.
Case in point: Filippo Loreti. The Italian watch brand launched as an unknown name in a category driven by heritage, with no existing trust. Blazon's tier-one press outreach landed coverage in Forbes, Bloomberg and TechCrunch, timed to sales milestones to keep momentum going well past day one.
Filippo Loreti took $5.1M in its first 30 days. The full breakdown is in the Filippo Loreti case study.
No launch window can make up for an audience that was never built. That is why the pre-launch work starts months before go-live, and why Blazon's pre-launch and waitlist team sits in every full launch.
Grow: where a launch becomes a business
The launch is the event. Grow is the business left standing afterwards, and for hardware it holds most of the commercial upside. Filippo Loreti took $5.1M in its first 30 days, and the direct-to-consumer business that followed passed $10M+.
The biggest risk after a launch is what Michael Raven calls the Dead Zone: the months between taking the first orders and the product shipping, when founders go quiet and the audience goes cold. Grow is built to close that gap from the day the launch window closes.
The Shopify store goes live as the product's permanent home, and the pre-order pipeline keeps taking orders while the factory works, so late arrivals still buy instead of bouncing. The store setup is covered in Blazon's guide to setting up pre-orders on Shopify.
Paid acquisition is then scaled to break-even return on ad spend, and scaled again once it holds. Klaviyo lifecycle flows are automated so revenue keeps arriving without daily intervention, and retention programs raise what each customer is worth.
Later in Grow come the second product or category, international expansion, and retail or enterprise pipeline.
Case in point: Homethings. Homethings validated demand for refillable eco-cleaning products at launch, then moved into a subscription DTC model. Blazon ran paid acquisition across Meta and Google and optimized the subscription funnel and retention to hold down churn.
The result was 500% year-one subscription revenue growth and 25,000+ active subscribers. The detail is in the Homethings case study.
Case in point: Nordgreen. Nordgreen, a Danish watch brand, had strong product-market fit at home and no international traction. Blazon ran paid media across Meta, Google and TikTok in 15+ languages, optimized the Shopify store for localized checkout and currency handling, and added email, loyalty and retention programs.
Nordgreen reached $4M+ in revenue across paid channels at 350% average return on ad spend, with 200,000+ customers in 50+ markets. See the Nordgreen case study.
RENS shows both halves in one brand. Its sneakers made from coffee waste launched with 500+ press hits worldwide, then Blazon scaled it to seven-figure DTC revenue, with Klaviyo email alone reaching 30%+ of total revenue. The store work behind all of this runs through Blazon's Shopify development and DTC growth team.
Why the order matters more than any single channel
Each phase feeds the next. The pre-launch audience feeds launch conversion, launch conversion feeds press, press feeds paid creative and paid feeds the store. The store feeds lifecycle email, email feeds retention, and retention funds the next launch.
When one channel misfires, the damage compounds down that chain. A launch that goes live to a cold list pays full acquisition prices in the one window where volume matters most, and no press coverage buys that back.
The reasoning behind the sequence, and the three Build decisions that carry most of the risk, are set out in the Blazon method: Build. Launch. Grow.
What the brand brings, and what it keeps
A launch agency cannot supply the product. The brand brings a working prototype, confirmed product details and availability, the decisions only a founder or product owner can make, and fast approvals.
What the brand keeps matters just as much. Ad accounts, pixels and audiences are opened in the client's name and stay with the client, so the data built during a launch does not walk out when the engagement ends.
If a launch underperforms, Blazon runs a post-mortem, finds the channel or execution gap, and rebuilds the approach with the client. No agency can guarantee a sales number, which is why Blazon sets targets against the audience measured before launch.
Working with Blazon
Blazon's clients are hardware and consumer tech founders with a working prototype, brands launching a physical product, deep tech companies bringing a first product to market, and corporate innovation teams launching a line outside the core business. For a full launch, the product launch agency page sets out the scope, with strategy, paid media, PR and Shopify run by one team.
Brands past launch that need the store, pre-orders and lifecycle email work with the Shopify team, and platform launches run through the crowdfunding team. The phase detail, team roles and engagement terms are on How We Work.
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute call where the product gets pressure-tested before anyone talks about scope. Founders weighing a launch partner for a new product can use that call to find out whether the numbers work at all.
Most launches are won or lost before the public sees anything. The 30 to 45 days everyone watches are where Build gets cashed in.
Frequently asked questions
How does a product launch agency work?
A product launch agency runs a product through a fixed sequence with one team. At Blazon that sequence is Build (6 to 24 weeks of positioning, pre-launch audience and tested creative), Launch (30 to 45 days of coordinated go-live across paid media, PR, influencers and email) and Grow (12 to 24+ months of store, lifecycle and expansion work). One strategy lead and one campaign manager hold the plan throughout.
What does a launch agency do?
It owns the plan, the creative, the channels and the timing of a product's entry to market, and it is measured on what the launch produces. That covers positioning, pricing, the pre-launch audience, the launch page and video, PR, paid media, email and the store. A PR firm or production studio delivers one of those pieces, while a launch agency sequences all of them.
What are the 7 steps of a product launch?
In Blazon's sequence: research the buyer, lock positioning and price, build a deposit-backed pre-launch audience, produce and test creative on cold traffic, brief press and influencers, run the live launch window, then grow through the store, lifecycle email and new markets. The first five happen before the public sees anything, and that is where most of the outcome is decided.
Is it worth hiring an agency to launch a product?
It is worth it when the product has a fixed launch date, no existing audience and a team without the specialists to run every channel at once. It is usually not worth it if the founder already has a large engaged audience or the product is not finished. Blazon takes on roughly one in five of the products that approach it for that reason.
How long does it take to launch and scale a brand?
At Blazon, getting from first call to kickoff takes about three weeks. A launch project runs three to six months, and a full Build, Launch, Grow engagement runs nine to 18 months, with growth work reaching up to 24 months after launch. Hardware takes longer when tooling and certification set the date.
Can you give an example of a product launch?
Filippo Loreti, an Italian watch brand, launched as an unknown name with tier-one press in Forbes, Bloomberg and TechCrunch timed to sales milestones, and took $5.1M in its first 30 days. Homethings is the scale example: it validated demand for refillable cleaning products, then grew to 25,000+ active subscribers through a subscription DTC model.
Who owns the ad accounts and customer data after a launch?
At Blazon, the client does. Ad accounts, pixels and audiences are opened in the client's name from day one and stay with the client when the engagement ends. The audience built during a launch is an asset of the business, not of the agency.
