Seasonal Brands Don't Win in Season. They Win Before It.

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How Biteback doubled summer sales year over year by preparing for Prime Day before the traffic arrived.

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For a seasonal brand, the calendar is unforgiving. Demand spikes inside a narrow window, and what you do in the weeks before that window decides how much of it you capture. Miss the prep and you spend the peak reacting: adjusting bids on the fly, watching rankings slip, and paying a premium for visibility that should already have been yours.

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Biteback knows this rhythm better than most. The brand started with a simple problem. A UK family noticed one of their homebred youngsters was reacting badly to midge bites, so they made something to help. That became Sweet Relief lotion, the first product of its kind for horses, launched in 2010 and followed shortly by a cream version. Everything is still made locally at their own premises in rural Wiltshire. It's a real product with real results, and it sells hardest in summer, when the midges are out and horse owners are looking for relief.

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That seasonality is exactly what made the opportunity interesting.

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The problem with a short season

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Biteback already had good products and a loyal following. The gap was in how the ecommerce side, particularly Amazon advertising, was set up to handle the summer surge. When demand is concentrated into a few months, and that period overlaps with Prime Day, the traffic doesn't wait for you to catch up. Competitors bid harder, costs per click climb, and brands that haven't done the groundwork end up buying visibility at the worst possible rates.

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The brief was simple to state and harder to execute: test more efficient advertising strategies to scale UK Amazon sales, and make the most of Prime Day landing in the middle of the season.

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What we did before the traffic arrived

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The work started well ahead of Prime Day, and it covered three areas: content, keywords, and campaign structure.

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Content came first, because ads are only as good as the pages they point to. We rewrote the listings for the top Sweet Relief products, reworking the titles, images, and copy so that Prime Day traffic landed on pages built to sell. There's no sense paying for clicks that hit a listing that doesn't convert.

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Keywords came next. We looked at what horse owners actually type when they're dealing with midge bites in peak summer, which isn't always the language they use the rest of the year, and rebuilt the Sweet Relief cream listing around those seasonal terms [confirm term count/examples] rather than assumptions. That meant the ads showed up for high-intent shoppers instead of burning spend on browsers.

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Then the campaigns themselves. Instead of switching everything on the moment Prime Day started, we launched and warmed them up early. That gave Amazon's algorithm time to learn, built visibility before costs spiked, and meant we weren't starting cold when traffic peaked. We used the early data to refine targeting and adjust bids, so the campaigns were already performing by the time Prime Day arrived.

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The aim throughout was efficiency. Scaling sales isn't only about spending more; it's about being ready so every pound of ad spend during the peak works harder than it would in a reactive setup.

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The result

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Biteback's products are now top sellers in their category. The Best Seller Rank of the top-selling Sweet Relief cream improved by 50%. And summer sales came in at twice the previous year, a full 2X year over year.

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That's what preparation buys a seasonal brand. The demand was always going to be there. What changed was how much of it Biteback was positioned to capture, and how efficiently. A better rank compounds, too, feeding organic visibility that keeps working after the paid push, which matters when your peak is measured in weeks rather than months.

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What seasonal brands can take from this

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None of this is specific to equine products or midge bites. It applies to any brand whose sales cluster into a defined window, whether that's summer, the festive period, or an event like Prime Day.

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The brands that scale during their season are rarely the ones that react well once it starts. They're the ones that did the content, keyword, and campaign work in the weeks before, so the peak is a matter of executing a plan rather than scrambling to build one. By the time the traffic arrives, it's too late to warm up an algorithm or rewrite a listing.

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If your brand has a season, the work that decides how well you do in it is happening now, in the quiet weeks before demand picks up.

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If you're not sure whether your listings and ad campaigns are ready for your next peak, that's a conversation worth having early. At MarketLeap, we help brands prepare before the traffic arrives, so the season works in their favour. Book a time to talk it through with our team. 

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