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Building a compliant, proprietary competition and community platform from the ground up
True Group partnered with Celtic Luck to launch Spruce Collective, a premium home and lifestyle platform combining prize competitions, exclusive brand partnerships, and community rewards.
What began as a competition site evolved into a consumer ecosystem designed to build long-term audience value and sustainable revenue beyond paid acquisition.
TrueGroup supported the partnership across strategy, brand identity, paid acquisition, platform development, compliance, CRM, community growth, social media, and analytics, from first concept to a validated, acquirable platform asset.
The Challenge
Spruce entered a highly competitive market facing several key challenges:
- Rising Meta and Google acquisition costs
- Low trust in the online competition space
- Regulatory and payment processing complexity
- Heavy reliance on paid media performance
At the same time, the business needed to:
- Build a credible consumer brand
- Create sustainable growth beyond paid traffic
- Improve conversion performance
- Develop compliant systems and infrastructure
- Grow an engaged audience
The goal was not simply to sell tickets, but to create a scalable consumer ecosystem.
Our Approach
Rather than positioning Celtic Luck as another giveaway site, the partnership built the brand around community, aspiration, and genuine value exchange.
The strategy paired lifestyle prizes with a discount hub offering partner savings, creating a reason to stay between campaigns. Urgency mechanics, email nurture, and gamified engagement turned one-time entrants into a loyal, engaged audience.
Growth Marketing & Paid Acquisition
We built and managed Spruce's full-funnel acquisition strategy across Meta. We continuously tested hooks, offer structures, pricing models, and membership positioning to optimise performance and reduce acquisition costs.
Key campaign types:
- Premium home and lifestyle prizes
- Brand partnership giveaways
- Influencer-led activations
- Community reward campaigns
- 10.7% Facebook conversion rate
- £80K+ Platform revenue
- 1,000s Of ads tested
A Face Behind the Brand
Putting real people at the centre of Spruce was key to building trust and organic reach. Through Reels and TikTok, street interviews, unboxings, and winner reactions, we gave the brand a human voice that audiences engaged with beyond the competitions themselves.
Community & Audience Growth
Parallel to paid acquisition, the free-to-enter prize draws were a deliberate audience growth tool. We drove organic growth through influencer collaborations, creator partnerships, community campaigns, and referral mechanics.
This built engagement and trust before full platform maturity while establishing strategic partnerships with premium lifestyle brands including Holloways of Ludlow.
- 38% Open rate on emails
- 15,000+ Total social media followers
Discount Partners
Alongside prize draws, we built a network of home and garden brand partnerships offering exclusive member discounts.
Partners were featured across channels, highlighted in editorial journal posts with matching emails and social content to drive awareness and claims.
Platform & Infrastructure
As the business evolved, we helped architect and support a transition away from third-party limitations toward a more scalable and resilient ecosystem.
- Proprietary tech stack: Custom-built platform with accounts, payments, raffle engine, discount hub, postal entry compliance, and admin tooling. Not Shopify. Not off-the-shelf.
- Webflow landing pages: dynamic, high-converting flow with A/B testing, optimised for AOV & CVR
- Regulatory foundation: RMG approval secured. Legal consultant retained. T&Cs, privacy policy, competition rules, and Gambling Act 2005 postal entry compliance all formalised.
- Payment infrastructure: NomuPay integrated as a long-term payment provider. Banks and Stripe are hostile to raffle businesses; this relationship is a genuine moat.
- 18,000+ Unique buyers
- 73% Checkout completion rate on our custom checkout
CRM & Email Marketing
Urgency-led campaigns, countdown sequences, ends-soon messaging, and payday promotions, consistently helped drive conversion.
The CRM infrastructure was built with full email authentication in place from the outset, protecting deliverability at scale.
- 0→10k Email subscribers in ~6 months
- 27K+ Total email subscribers
- 95%+Deliverability rate
Winners & Trust
Every element, from the draw mechanism to post-win communications, was designed to signal legitimacy and generate shareable winner moments.
In a category defined by consumer scepticism, building visible trust was non-negotiable.
Winners were drawn using Random.org with downloadable audit logs. A public winners page, Trustpilot integration, and winner testimonials formed a compounding trust layer that fed back into paid creative.
I was the lucky winner 🎉🎉 I was the lucky winner for Ninja Slushi. I received my prize within few days thanks to Amy. Spruce collective has an amazing customer service... My family is enjoying frozen cocktails and slushies this summer at home. 😊
Results & Impact
Key Outcomes
- Built a recognisable consumer-facing lifestyle brand
- Grew a substantial owned audience across email and social
- Achieved Meta Real Money Gaming (RMG) approval
- Developed scalable CRM and rewards infrastructure
- Created a reusable competition and rewards framework
- Established strategic partnerships with lifestyle brands and creators
- Improved conversion clarity through ongoing UX and messaging optimisation
- 27K+Total email subscribers powering ongoing launches and retention.
- 15K+Total social followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook driving consistent top-of-funnel demand.
- 38% Email open rate indicating strong audience interest and campaign resonance
- 99% Email deliverability rate keeping performance high and inbox placement consistent.
- £80K+ Platform revenue milestone achieved through improved customer journey and lifecycle marketing.
- 18K+ Orders from unique buyers demonstrating broad demand and repeatable acquisition.
- 320K+ Page views generated across key site and campaign pages.
- 10.7% Facebook conversion rate outperforming direct (5.9%), Instagram (8.5%), and Brevo email (5.6%).
- 73% Custom checkout completion rate reducing drop-off at the highest-intent stage.
