Twenty plus meetings in the first month and a deal closed directly from the work four weeks in, on a first move into outbound in 2023.
See if You QualifyOut of Bounds is a branding and design studio in Leeds, based at Castleton Mill. The work covers brand identity, naming, design systems, packaging, digital product design and motion.
Jamie Donaldson is Creative Director. He trained at Manchester School of Art and has spent over a decade designing brand identities, and print and digital work, for clients of all sizes in the UK and internationally.
A studio that sells brand and design work, buying outbound for the first time. Out of Bounds had never run the channel, so there was no list, no infrastructure and no evidence about which part of their market would respond.
One market was worked properly before a word of copy went out, which changed who the campaign reached as much as what it said. Replies were called and qualified rather than handed over as a list.
The figures on this page come from the first engagement, which ran from late 2023 to around August 2024. The 20+ meetings and the £18.9K closed in four weeks belong to that work, not to anything that has run since.
Targeting doors and windows worked. A second campaign built on e-commerce technology tags, WooCommerce and Shopify, generated volume but was too technically led: the people who replied wanted to talk about the specifics of an e-commerce build, which is not what Out of Bounds sells. That engagement ended in 2024.
Out of Bounds came back in March 2026, and a new programme ran from 4 June to 10 July. Four segments were built rather than one list: Premium, General, Furniture and Metal Staircase, all UK. The brief was founder and owner level, and the list that went out was considerably wider than that: directors were the largest single group on it, ahead of owners, chief executives and founders, and it also took in designers, managing directors, project managers, sales managers and account managers. Roughly 15,240 leads were loaded and around 52,000 emails went out across five weeks.
The sequence was deliberately short. Two steps, the second a bump sent into the same thread rather than arriving as a fresh subject line. Text only, with open tracking and link tracking off, and a reply stopped the sequence. The step-one subject line ran as an A/B test. On 24 June the copy was rewritten: a new subject, and the opening argument moved from referral-dependency to the brand not keeping pace with the business.
It did not land. 85 replies came back from 79 people, two of whom took up the offer of a brand snapshot, and the programme was paused on 10 July. The volume was there and the argument did not persuade this market. Whether the width of the list explains that is not established, but it is a plausible part of it: an argument written for the person who owns the brand decision reads differently to a project manager or an account manager who does not.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings booked | None, no outbound | 20+ in the first month |
| Revenue from the programme | None | £18.9K closed in four weeks |
| Outbound channel | Not running | Running and reinvested in |
“They did a really deep dive into targeting a specific market with us, then wrote copy that led to 20+ meetings in the first month. Four weeks in, we closed an £18.9K deal directly from BuiltDiffernt’s work. This was our first move into outbound marketing and they made it incredibly easy and a no-brainer to keep investing in long term.”
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