HQ28 Hit 12.5× ROAS and Cut Campaign Launch Time from 4 Days to 4 Minutes

Brand: HQ28

Category: Gaming Peripherals

Industry: Consumer Electronics

Location: Berlin, Germany

Founded: 2019

Tagline: How HQ28 scaled their gaming brand with AI-generated creatives that actually convert.

At a Glance

• 12.5 ROAS
• +78K followers

Performance Metrics

The Challenge

HQ28 was launching a new line of mechanical keyboards into a crowded, highly visual market dominated by established brands with large creative teams. Their two-person in-house marketing team spent 3–4 days per campaign producing static images and video scripts — briefing a freelance editor, waiting for revisions, then manually uploading and configuring each ad in Meta and TikTok Ads Manager. By the time a campaign went live, the creative brief was already a week old.

Ad fatigue compounded the problem. With a limited creative library, the same assets ran until performance collapsed. Their previous ROAS of 3.2× was acceptable, but inconsistent — good weeks followed by dead weeks as audiences tuned out the same visuals. They needed volume, variety, and speed without sacrificing the premium dark-and-minimal aesthetic that their audience expected from a high-end peripheral brand. Hiring more creatives wasn't feasible; the margins on hardware simply didn't support a larger team.

The Larven Solution

Using Larven AI, HQ28 connected their product photography and brand guidelines to the platform in a single onboarding session. The brand-lock feature ingested their existing high-performing creatives, extracted the visual DNA — dark backgrounds, tight product shots, restrained typography — and applied it as a constraint to every subsequent generation. This meant all AI-generated output felt native to the HQ28 brand without requiring manual review of every asset.

Within the first session, they had 40+ unique ad creatives across formats: Meta carousels, TikTok vertical videos, Instagram Stories, and static display banners. Larven's direct Ads Manager integration allowed the team to review, approve, and publish all 40 variants directly from the platform — eliminating the upload, configuration, and targeting setup that had previously added hours to every launch. A/B tests went live the same day. The team set a weekly cadence: new creative batch every Monday, performance review every Friday, winning formats scaled the following week.

Results

Within 60 days, HQ28's campaigns hit a 12.5× ROAS — nearly 4× their previous baseline. The improvement came not from a single breakthrough creative, but from the volume of testing. With 40+ variants launching weekly, the platform's performance data identified winning angles within 72 hours: close-up texture shots of keycaps outperformed lifestyle setups 2.8:1 on Meta; fast-cut unboxing edits outperformed static images 3.4:1 on TikTok.

Social following grew by 78K organically as high-quality video ads were shared by gaming communities. Campaign launch time dropped from 4 days to under 4 minutes. Ad spend waste fell 62% as budget shifted automatically to proven formats. The two-person team now runs 3× more concurrent campaigns than before — and spends less time on execution than they did when running a third as many.

Quote

We used to dread launch week. Now we're spinning up campaigns before our morning coffee. Larven AI didn't just save us time — it made our ads actually good.

Larven Solutions Used

• AI Ad Generator
• Brand Kit
• Multi-format Export
• A/B Testing