"How two Irish marketers built Canvas Marketing Solutions a Dublin-based agency that generates over €1.2 million in annual profit for Australian beauty brands, using AI, relentless client focus, and a refusal to say no."When Patrick McKenna left a corporate career working on Google contracts for vendor companies to back himself as an independent marketing consultant in 2019, few would have predicted where the decision would lead. Seven years later, he and his partner Sarah are running Canvas Marketing Solutions from Dublin, quietly generating over €2 million in additional annual profit for beauty companies on the other side of the world.
There was no venture capital, no flashy launch, no London office. Patrick had spent years working on Google Ads contracts across the UK and Ireland before picking up freelance work as a marketing manager for a London-based performance marketing firm, a role he ran from a tiny room on the south coast of Spain during Covid. When he decided to go out on his own properly, the pitch was simple: treat every client's budget as if it were his own, and let the results do the talking.
That approach caught the attention of Australian beauty brands looking for performance, not promises. Among them were Ezmio Beauty, one of Australia's fastest-growing nail care brands, and Fresh Skin Clinic, a long-established skincare clinic in Perth. Alevia, a medical weight loss practice, also came on board. Each had different challenges, but all shared the same frustration, marketing spend that wasn't translating into growth. So what made you want to go out on your own? "The agencies I worked for were so rigid. The same play book for every single client. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't but the agency owners didn't care, it was a numbers game, they only needed a small number of clients to stick and they were making more then enough money. It really didn't sit right with me," said Patrick
Patrick and Sarah set out to change that. "Whatever a client needs to grow, we're going to deliver, paid advertising across every major platform including Google, Meta, TikTok, and Bing, SEO, influencer collaboration strategy, AI Chatbot implementation, website and application development, we've done it all at this point and we're willing to do anything else the business requires. If we don't have someone who can do it, we'll hire someone who can. That," Patrick says, "is the secret sauce."
"We don't say no and we don't pass the buck," he said. "If a client needs something to grow, we figure it out. That's what Canvas is all about."
The combined impact across their Australian beauty portfolio now exceeds €2 million in additional annual profit, a figure that has transformed the trajectory of the businesses they work with.
"We're not a big agency. We don't want to be," Patrick said. "Every client we take on gets our direct attention. That's the whole point. When a campaign underperforms, it's our problem to fix — not something that gets passed down to a junior."
The couple's client retention rates tell their own story, running at more than 500% above the industry average for marketing agencies. In an industry where businesses routinely cycle through agencies every few months, Canvas's clients stay — and grow.
What makes the arrangement unusual is the geography. Patrick and Sarah operate entirely from Ireland, managing campaigns for businesses in Perth, Sydney, and across Australia without ever needing to be in the same time zone. It's a model that would have seemed impractical a decade ago, but one that their clients say works precisely because of the discipline it demands.
"Patrick and Sarah don't just run our ads," said one Australian client. "They understand our business. They know our margins, they know our customers, and they flag problems before we even see them."
Canvas Marketing Solutions hit six figures in revenue in its first year of operation — a milestone the founders credit entirely to their clients.
A major factor in the agency's recent growth has been its aggressive adoption of AI-powered development. Patrick and Sarah now use AI to write code across virtually every aspect of their operation — building custom marketing tools, automating internal workflows, developing bespoke website functionality for clients, and creating solutions for business needs that would previously have required a full development team. The result has been a doubling of Canvas's revenue and a dramatic expansion of what two people can offer.
"The scope of what we can build now is honestly staggering," Patrick said. "A client comes to us with a problem — any problem — and we can build a solution for it. Internal tools, website features, marketing applications, whatever they need. AI has turned us from a marketing agency into something closer to a marketing and technology partner, and it's happened fast."
But for Patrick and Sarah, the numbers that matter most are their clients' numbers. The €1.2 million figure isn't a projection or a gross revenue estimate — it represents verified additional profit generated for Australian beauty businesses through campaigns they built, managed, and optimised from Dublin.
Media Contact
Company Name:Canvas Marketing Solutions
Contact Person: Patrick McKenna Walsh
Email:Send Email
Phone: 0896040336
Address:82 the Dunes, Portmarnock
City: Saggart
State: Dublin
Country: Ireland
Press Release Distributed by ABNewswire.com
To view the original version on ABNewswire visit: Irish Marketing Couple Drive Australian Beauty Companies' Profits Up by Over €1.2 Million Annually
