About
We started Lockwater because the reports didn’t match the bank account.
2019
Founded
20
People
5
Cities
~40%
US clients
01
Story
In 2019 Noor Vermeulen had just helped take a Dutch apparel brand from €2M to €30M in revenue. Along the way she had hired four agencies. Each one sent a report claiming most of the sales. Added together, the reports claimed more revenue than the company made.
So she started Lockwater with one rule: judge every euro by contribution margin, not by what the platform says it did. That meant fixing tracking before touching budgets, running holdouts to see what was real, and making far more creative than most agencies thought was sensible.
Seven years later we’re 20 people in Amsterdam, Lisbon, Paris, Rotterdam and Utrecht, and about 40% of our clients sell mainly in the US. The rule hasn’t changed.
Principles
What
we
believe
01
Contribution margin over ROAS screenshots
A 5× ROAS on a product that loses money is still a loss, so we report the number your finance lead cares about.
02
Every change ships as a test with a holdout where possible
When we can’t show what would have happened without a change, we say so and treat the result as a hint, not proof.
03
Creative volume is a strategy, not a deliverable
Most ads lose, so we make 20 to 80 a month and let the tests find the few that carry the account.
04
Your accounts, your data, your files
We work inside your ad accounts, and everything we make is yours the day it’s delivered, even if you leave.
05
No guarantees, only targets and weekly reporting
Nobody can promise a ROAS before seeing your margins, so we agree targets and show you the progress every week.
Team
The
people
on
your
account
Amsterdam
Noor Vermeulen
Founder & Managing Partner
Noor ran growth at a Dutch DTC apparel brand, taking it from €2M to €30M in revenue, and spent much of that time reconciling agency reports that didn’t match the bank account. She founded Lockwater in 2019 to fix that. She still joins every Growth Audit read-out and signs off each client’s 90-day plan. Most weekends she swims in the North Sea at Zandvoort, in any season.
Lisbon
Tomás Lindqvist
Head of Paid Social
Tomás has bought media on Meta and TikTok for nine years, across fashion, apps and subscription boxes. He built Lockwater’s weekly creative-testing cadence: new ads live every Monday, a winners review every Friday, no skipped weeks. He owns Paid Social and checks spend pacing on every account before 9 am Lisbon time. He keeps a spreadsheet of every hook he has ever tested.
Amsterdam
Aisha Bakker
Head of Search & Shopping
Aisha led search in-house at a European marketplace, where she moved bidding from revenue to margin and never went back. At Lockwater she owns Paid Search & Shopping: she builds product-level margin feeds and splits Performance Max by what each product actually earns. She will ask for your cost of goods before she asks for your ROAS target, and she means it kindly.
Paris
Jules Moreau
Creative Director
Jules came to Lockwater from a Paris social video studio, where he learned to cut a usable ad on a phone in the back of a taxi. He runs the creator network and the UGC brief process. Every brief starts from account data, names one hook and one objection, and fits on a single page. He watches the first three seconds of every ad before it ships.
Rotterdam
Mei Takahashi
Head of CRO & Lifecycle
Mei worked in product growth at a subscription app, running onboarding and paywall tests every week. At Lockwater she owns both conversion rate optimization and email and SMS lifecycle, because the landing page and the welcome flow are one conversation with the same customer. She ships a landing-page test every two weeks and keeps a shared log of the tests that lost.
Utrecht
Daan de Wit
Analytics Lead
Daan builds the plumbing everyone else relies on: server-side tracking, MER dashboards and the geo holdout tests that show whether a campaign added revenue or just claimed it. Before a new client’s campaigns go live, he checks their conversion data against real orders. He is the reason every Lockwater weekly report ends with a confidence note, and he cycles to every meeting in Utrecht.
Culture
How
we
work
01
Writing first
Plans, test results and decisions live in shared docs. Meetings are for the things writing can’t settle.
02
Small, stable pods
Each client gets three or four people who stay on the account. Nobody hands you to a junior after the pitch.
03
Losing tests get shared
Every Friday we post the tests that lost and what they taught us, so the next client doesn’t pay for the same lesson.
04
Sane hours
Core hours are 10:00–16:00 CET. Nobody is expected to answer Slack at night, including for US clients.
Remote-first, on CET
Clients
What
clients
say.
Transcript
We were paying €3.90 an install, and most of those people never opened the app twice. Lockwater moved our optimization to trial starts, fixed our SKAN mapping and shifted half the budget to TikTok. Six months later we were at €2.70 an install, with more than twice the installs, and trial-to-paid went from 11 to 17 percent.
“They stopped us paying for installs that never opened the app twice. Trial-to-paid went from 11 to 17 percent.”
Sam Okafor
Head of Growth, Coinlet
Transcript
Shopping was the channel we argued about every month. It cost the most, and nobody could say which products were paying for it. Lockwater rebuilt our feed around margin and split campaigns by what each product actually earns. Five months later Shopping ROAS was 4.1, up from 2.6, and it’s now our most profitable channel.
“Shopping went from our most expensive channel to our most profitable one in five months.”
Elena Ruiz
Co-founder, Oakshade
“We had nine ad accounts, three agencies and no idea what was working. Lockwater cut it to one dashboard and one number. MER went from 2.2 to 3.6.”
Mara Linde
Founder, Northdose
“The first creative sprint gave us 20 ads. Four of them are still running a year later.”
Jonas Brandt
Head of Growth, Kelpie Skin
“In week one they told us to switch off two campaigns we loved. Painful, and right.”
Priya Anand
VP Marketing, Ticketloom
“Our cost per booked appointment almost halved across twelve clinics, and every call is now tied to the ad that drove it.”
Lotte Jansen
Operations Director, Keelbridge Dental Group