Neck pillow brand Necklow hit $1M in 3 months — one viral ad and a $380K sale about two years later

Firas Balaffou, originally from an island off the coast of Tunisia, launched Necklow in 2020: a D2C orthopedic neck-pillow brand filled with fine air-filled balls that adapt to multiple sleeping positions. It reached $1 million in sales within three months of launch and had built up roughly 80,000 total customers by May 2022. That same year, it sold to OpenStore, a Shopify-brand acquirer, for $380,000 in cash. Including $30,000 of inventory, the total deal came to $410,000, at a 1.8x EBITDA multiple.

Dollar figures in this article convert at roughly ¥150/$1: $1M in sales is about ¥150 million. The $380,000 sale price is about ¥57 million. And the $410,000 total including inventory is about ¥61.5 million.

The numbers from launch to sale

The business and its backstory

Before Necklow, Balaffou spent three years dropshipping products sourced from AliExpress into France and the US, starting at roughly one product a week while teaching himself e-commerce. Those three years aren’t discussed in terms of revenue, but they laid the operational groundwork for the ad-buying skills that came later.

Necklow was an extension of that experience with one decisive difference: instead of many other people’s products, he narrowed down to a single, self-branded product. The orthopedic-function pitch and the concrete claim of adapting to multiple sleep positions are the kind of thing you can demonstrate directly in a video ad. That set the terms for everything that followed.

Breaking down why it grew

The turning point in this story is that a single ad, launched right after release, went viral. That ad topped 3 million views, and stayed profitable a full year later. Normally, e-commerce ad creative fatigues and loses efficiency within weeks or months. Having one ad that stayed active for a year means customer acquisition cost was structurally low for that entire stretch.

So why did that one ad happen? Balaffou’s method leans on process rather than raw talent. He studied ads from existing brands with the same target buyer (breaking down headlines, narrative structure, how testimonials were presented, copywriting, and product demonstrations) and on top of that, kept releasing at least one new ad every two weeks. His own advice sums it up: “I’d recommend learning from existing brands with a similar target audience. It’s a huge shortcut that saves a lot of trial and error figuring out what ad format works for you.”

The hit-rate figure reflects the nature of this method. A win rate of roughly 3 out of 5 sounds high at a glance. But flip it around: 2 out of 5 miss, and the whole approach assumes you keep running enough volume to absorb those misses. The honest read is that the viral ad, rather than being engineered on purpose, landed as a result of breaking down existing winning patterns and simply keeping the output volume high.

One more thing not to overlook: that $1M in sales generated almost no profit. After product cost and ad spend, it was “roughly break-even.” Behind the flashy top-line number, this business had ad spend eating into margin from day one, and the whole question was whether it could be improved on either the cost side or the acquisition-cost side.

Why he let go after two years

The second turning point is the decision in May 2022. The business was growing, but what stopped Balaffou was himself, not demand. “The business was growing but the operational and scaling challenges were becoming unmanageable. I didn’t have experience efficiently solving certain problems, and the stress was building up.”

The sale process moved fast. After he asked OpenStore for an offer, a response came back within 24 hours. He reviewed it point by point with people in his own network and negotiated a 15% increase. From there, business verification took two weeks and due diligence four weeks, roughly six weeks total to close.

The multiple was 1.8x EBITDA. Dividing $380,000 by 1.8 works out to roughly $210,000 in annual EBITDA, or around $17,000/month in profit (only the sale price and multiple were publicly disclosed. This monthly figure is our own back-calculation). A 1.8x multiple is the kind of range that tends to result when a seller prioritizes speed over negotiation time. In exchange for an offer in 24 hours and a close in six weeks, he traded away any upside on price.

Not all smooth sailing

There’s the early fact that $1M in sales generated almost no profit. There was a stretch where customer acquisition cost offset revenue growth, something that’s entirely hidden if you only look at the headline number, “$1M in three months.”

The ad-dependent structure, moreover, never went away. Facebook and Google paid ads remained the main channel throughout, which means shifts in platform delivery costs and review policy hit the bottom line directly. There’s no mention of organic search traffic, community, or any acquisition pillar independent of ad spend.

And the founder’s own stated reason for stepping away, operational difficulty, matters too. Once he had six contractors, what he ran into wasn’t a shortage of ability to sell the product, but a shortage of ability to run the organization and logistics. Focusing on one product accelerated the launch, but the skills required beyond that point turned out to be a different thing entirely.

What’s reproducible, and what isn’t

What’s highly reproducible is turning ad creative into a process: break down ads from existing brands targeting the same buyer, borrow elements piece by piece, output at a steady cadence, and judge by hit rate. This whole flow applies regardless of product category, and the operating instincts built over three years of dropshipping are the kind of thing that can be filled in through outsourcing or learning.

What isn’t reproducible starts with the combination of product and timing: in 2020, with people spending more time at home, he had a product that let a real pain point, sleeping position, be shown in a video at a glance. Whether you have this kind of “pain point that reads instantly on video” is a question that gets decided before ad execution even comes into play. Neither is the fact that the first ad hit 3 million views and stayed active for a year: method can raise your odds, but it can’t guarantee it.

There’s a similar line on the sell side. That an acquirer like OpenStore, which buys up Shopify brands on a short timeline, existed at all depended on the market conditions of that specific period. Getting an offer in 24 hours and closing in six weeks was possible because the buyer had a standardized evaluation process, something you can’t expect from an individual buyer search in a typical sale. In exchange, the price landed at 1.8x EBITDA. Whether you choose speed or price is a choice, and this case is a record of someone who chose speed.

After the sale, Balaffou took six months off, then launched TheraPetMD, a calming-diffuser brand for pets, which reportedly reached eight-figure revenue in its first year. In his own words: “If you need cash, and you feel stuck and stagnant, just sell. A new business will come along afterward, bigger, and more successful.”

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