How Home Centre Won 35% More First-Time Customers

The challenge

Retail never stops needing fresh content. Home Centre's shoppers range from people researching furniture reviews on YouTube to people scrolling social media for seasonal decor ideas, and each mindset calls for different creative in different formats.

Heading into White Friday, the region's culturally adapted take on Black Friday and one of the year's biggest retail moments, Home Centre wanted to refresh its Saudi advertising completely, with two aims: boost engagement and reach shoppers who had never bought from the brand. An "always-on" strategy meant fresh assets, fast. High ad frequency brings creative fatigue, which means steep drops in engagement and higher ad costs.

The team set strict requirements for product authenticity. AI-generated scenes could change the setting, but not the product. A linen sectional, for example, had to look exactly as it does in Home Centre stores. The imagery also had to be photorealistic and feel genuinely Saudi.

The solution

Home Centre teamed up with Jellyfish to build an AI-driven production pipeline, with Pencil Pro at its centre. Pencil served as the control layer for the whole campaign, bringing every AI model into one brand-governed environment and carrying the work from brief to ideation and from production to measurement.

By embedding Pencil Pro as an AI orchestration layer, with brand localisation guardrails built into the platform itself, we enabled Home Center to scale creative while maintaining control and consistency – Saumil Mehta, Account Director, Jellyfish

Working through the OS, the team used Nano Banana for image generation and product manipulation, Veo for video, and Gemini to transcreate and localise copy into Arabic.

The creative concept was "sketch to reality." The team began with raw, hand-drawn sketches of a living room and transformed them into fully styled, photorealistic spaces featuring Home Centre furniture. Designers kept full artistic control over every detail.

The results

The workflow transformed output almost overnight:

• 15 new static assets
• 3 distinct videos
• 15 localised headline variations tested at scale

The shift also changed how the team worked. Products could be placed in fully customised, Saudi-inspired environments without permits or multi-location shoots, which kept high-touch production focused on core hero storytelling.

Creative then went live, creating a real-time feedback loop for scoring quality and running live A/B tests. Instead of spending weeks on a single hero asset, the team deployed dozens of variations and tested hooks, messaging and calls to action. Spend flowed automatically to winning ads, cutting turnaround times and reducing ad fatigue. Testing also surfaced unexpected high performers: beyond sofas, lamps, lighting and mirrors emerged as key drivers of new customer growth.

The team fed the content into automated, AI-powered campaigns focused on new customer acquisition, which optimised spend toward high-value Saudi shoppers new to Home Centre. The outcome:

• +35% new customer acquisitions in Saudi Arabia vs. the previous 30-day baseline
• +1% click-through rate over Home Centre's average, evidence that the localised visuals resonated

With Pencil Pro already orchestrating its creative, Home Centre now sees agentic AI as the next frontier: systems that analyse performance in real time, anticipate creative fatigue and self-optimise asset variations.