About the Brand

Legacy Brought the Brand Back. Relevance Would Take It Further.

Lotto Sport Italia was founded in 1973 and built its reputation through tennis and football footwear before becoming one of the world’s recognised sports brands. India knew Lotto through the late 1990s before the brand stepped away around 2012.

When Lotto returned in 2025 through a 40-year exclusive India licence with Agilitas Sports, it brought back a globally recognised identity built on comfort, performance, and style. What it didn’t bring back was its marketplace presence. On Myntra, there were no listings, no sales history, and no search signals.

The return wasn’t about reclaiming the past. It was about earning visibility in a marketplace where relevance comes before recognition, entering the country’s biggest festive shopping season from a standing start.

The Brief

Fresh Territory. One Festive Window. Built From the Ground Up.

Lotto didn’t enter Myntra looking for a foothold. It entered looking for a frontier.

A platform this competitive rewards history. Established footwear brands had spent years earning their algorithm signals, their search placement, their discoverability. Keyword control belongs to the platform, not the advertiser. For most brands, that’s a constraint. For Lotto, it was simply the terrain.

The mandate was clear: chart search relevance from a standing start, capture branded demand the moment it emerged, and scale without letting efficiency slip. Not in six months. In one festive window.

Three objectives shaped every move that followed:

  • Earn a search presence where placement is won through algorithm signals, not keyword bids, building from the ground up with no prior Myntra footprint.
  • Capture branded demand the moment it surfaced organically, converting discovery into Lotto sessions before it could reach a competitor’s page.
  • Scale through the OND peak with the efficiency discipline that makes growth compound beyond the season that sparked it.

Challenges

Three Walls Between the Launch and the Festive Podium.

Lotto’s launch wasn’t just a new campaign going live. It was a new account, a new relevance signal, and a brand identity entering a platform that had never seen it.

  • Walking In With Nothing the Algorithm Could Use:
    No search presence. No sales record. No brand recall in footwear. Every competitor had months, sometimes years, of performance history shaping their placement and discoverability. Lotto had none of it, and OND wasn’t waiting while the account caught up.
  • A Search Map That Belonged to the Platform, Not the Brand
    Myntra’s visibility is driven by platform signals, not keyword bids. Lotto couldn’t choose where it appeared. The keyword map had to be discovered through real customer behaviour before it could be used, and the clock was already running.
  • Growing Without Letting Growth Become Expensive
    Scaling reach in a competitive footwear category is easy to do at the wrong cost. As presence grew, traffic quality could dilute, CPCs could spike, and early efficiency gains could vanish. Volume without efficiency is a launch that burns bright for one season and can’t fund a second.

The Strategy

Earn Visibility. Capture Demand. Scale With Proof. In That Order.

Most launches chase visibility from day one. L&F’s approach for Lotto took a different route: earn relevance first, protect it once it existed, and expand only once the data confirmed it was ready to scale.

THE DEFAULT PLAYBOOK L&F’s APPROACH
Bid hard on Top of Search from day ones Prioritise Product Page placements as contextual recommendations first
Chase impressions immediately Build visibility through discovery, not short-term efficiency
Split spend evenly across generic and branded Sequence spend ~60% discovery / ~40% branded as signals stabilise
Expand catalogue and reach together, early Expand Top of Search and catalogue depth only after CTR and CVR prove out

Three steps structured the campaign from launch through festive peak.

1. Build Visibility (Foundation): Search visibility over short-term efficiency. Product Page placements over Top of Search, showing up as a contextual recommendation rather than competing for slots the account hadn’t earned yet.

2. Capture Demand (Stabilisation): Brand protection introduced early so discovery converted to Lotto sessions, not competitor ones. Spend shifted to approximately 60% discovery and 40% branded. Demand allowed to grow on its own terms.

3. Planned Scale (Expansion): Top of Search unlocked only after signals stabilised. Catalogue expanded only after relevance was confirmed. Every step forward earned by what came before it. Scale followed signal, not spend ambition.

Strategic Principle: Visibility > Relevance > Scale.

Operational Execution

Discovery to Peak: Phase by Phase, Signal by Signal.

Phase 1: Discovery and Visibility Build

Zero history means zero assumptions. Auto targeting activated, letting the platform find where Lotto belonged inside the footwear search universe. Product Page placements over Top of Search, earning relevance from the ground up. Impressions were the measure. Discovery was the job.

Phase 2: Brand Capture and Controlled Scale

Branded traffic started appearing. That’s the moment that can’t be missed, awareness that leaks to a competitor is spend already lost. Brand protection introduced within the first week. Spend scaled deliberately, always following signal, never manufacturing it. The account was building something real.

Phase 3: Placement Optimisation and Expansion

The signals were there. Visibility pushed toward Top of search. The catalogue expanded to match. Every move earned by what came before it. When the festive peak arrived, the account didn’t scramble to meet it. It was already there.

The Results

What Earned Relevance Delivers When the Festive Window Opens.

OND 2025 results vs. initial months post product listing and campaign launch.

  • ~60x
    Orders Run-Rate Growth
  • ~50x
    Revenue Velocity
  • ~50%
    Faster Brand Maturity vs Competitors
  • +139 Bps
    CVR Improvement
  • ~4x
    Click-to-Order Efficiency

What the Launch Unlocked

Sixty Times the Orders. None of It Bought. All of It Earned.

The headline number is 60x. The finding underneath it matters more. That 60x was not the result of outspending the competition on Myntra. It was the result of a strategy that built in the right order: earning algorithmic relevance before chasing scale, protecting brand demand before it could leak, and expanding only when the signals confirmed the platform was ready to reward it.

When Phase 1 delivered impression growth and discovery, Phase 2 had brand signals to protect. When Phase 2 built branded familiarity, Phase 3 had traffic quality to scale. When Phase 3 concentrated spend where CTR and CVR proved it, the festive peak found an account that could carry the load. Each phase made the next one better.

Lotto Sport Italia’s Myntra launch is not a story about spending into a market. It is a story about earning a place in one.

The Takeaway

The Sequence Is the Strategy. The OND Numbers Are the Proof.

A zero-history brand in a competitive marketplace cannot shortcut the sequence. Visibility before relevance. Relevance before scale. Scale with the efficiency discipline that makes growth compound beyond the season that sparked it. That is the framework. Lotto’s OND 2025 is the framework with numbers attached.

60x order run-rate. 50x revenue velocity. 9x spend scale without efficiency dilution. 139 basis points of CVR improvement. CTR and CPC advantages over category competitors with far deeper platform history. Funnel leakage cut nearly in half. Branded search demand growing 3 to 4x in a single cycle. Traffic quality improving as scale increased.

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