Leaf, a Newcastle-based technology and data science company delivering performance intelligence for eCommerce brands, started life far from a UK-headquartered eCommerce specialist.
The business was originally founded on the other side of the world as Leaf Music, a platform designed to help musicians engage audiences and monetise their work at a time when streaming was rapidly reshaping the industry.
“We started the business in Costa Rica,” said CEO and co-founder Gilbert Corrales (pictured left, main image).
“Our original mission with Leaf Music was to empower musicians to engage, grow and monetise audiences.”
At the time, Corrales and his co-founders Helga Alvarez (CTO, pictured centre) and Wesley Hartley (CCO, right) believed artists had been pushed out of the value chain by streaming platforms.
Revenue had shifted away from albums and towards live gigs, while playlists – not musicians – increasingly dictated discovery.
He continued: “Artists went from making money through CD sales and albums to not making money from their music, and instead making money through gigs.
“Music became playlist-centric rather than artist-centric.”
A hard lesson in scale
While the mission resonated, the business struggled to scale in the way the founders had hoped.
Corrales described the period as when a romantic idea met commercial reality.
“It worked, but it didn’t work at the scale we expected, or in a way that allowed us to fully deliver on that mission,” he said.
“I don’t think that problem has really been solved, even today.”
What did work, however, was the underlying capability the team had built – marketing execution, data analysis and performance optimisation.
“For all the musicians and labels we worked with, we were actually very good at helping them make money,” Corrales explained.
“We were very good at marketing, analysing data and running data-informed campaigns.”
The collaboration that validated the pivot
The turning point came when Leaf began applying those same frameworks outside music and into retail.
“One of our first customers was Footasylum,” Corrales recalled. “That came off the back of a collaboration with Peak.”
The Manchester-based decision intelligence company, which has now been acquired by UiPath, was working with Footasylum to model audiences and demand.
Leaf hypothesised that Peak’s outputs could become inputs for performance marketing, using predictive insights to shape campaign structure and spend.
“Richard [Potter] from Peak had this hypothesis that their outputs could become Leaf’s inputs,” Corrales explained.
“We validated that with Footasylum. We were able to take campaigns that were loss-making and turn them into profit-making campaigns.
“But more importantly, we helped build a framework that they continued to use.
“It proved the frameworks worked and that they worked just as well for retail brands as they did for artists.”
From musicians to merchants
That validation accelerated Leaf’s shift away from music and towards eCommerce and direct-to-consumer brands.
“We changed who we were helping,” said the CEO. “Originally we were helping musicians. Now we’re helping business owners.
“Whether you’re Justin Bieber or Nike, you’re competing for the same attention.
“Everyone’s fighting for the same space on social platforms.”
For eCommerce brands, that fight has only intensified, compounded by factors like regulation and platform changes.
He continued: “As a business owner, it’s a really difficult space to play in. Channels change constantly, regulations change, tracking breaks.”
Building technology to solve their own problems
Rather than operating as a traditional agency, Leaf continued to take an engineering-led approach, building software internally to solve the problems it encountered first-hand.
“Launching a properly optimised Facebook campaign used to take four hours,” Corrales said.
“Nobody has four hours to tweak settings.”
The business built its own tools to handle that complexity, initially focusing on campaign execution, before shifting towards data integrity and performance intelligence.
“We realised the next jump wasn’t managing campaigns,” he said.
“It was understanding the data coming back and making use of it.”
That thinking now supports Leaf’s two core solutions: Signal, which protects and monitors conversion tracking; and Answers, which analyses performance data in real time to surface insights.
Leaf launches Signal – a tracking solution tackling one of eCommerce’s biggest performance risks
Choosing Newcastle
Although Leaf works with brands across the UK, Europe and the US, the company has remained headquartered in Newcastle since moving to the UK through a government-backed accelerator programme more than a decade ago.
Corrales and his co-founders were handpicked by the UKTI’s Sirius Programme after proving their credentials early in their career.
They have grown the business over the past decade from its Newcastle base and it ranked fifth in BusinessCloud’s most recent MarTech 50.
“We realised we didn’t need to be elsewhere,” Corrales said on staying in the North East.
“You can run a business from almost anywhere now.
“Not being in a place like London means we can be more selective.
“We weren’t constantly pulled into things just because we were nearby.”
Today, Leaf operates with teams in the UK, Costa Rica and Indonesia, employing around 30 people following a deliberate reduction from a pandemic-era peak of 60.
“We’re delivering more revenue now with roughly half the staff,” Corrales said. “AI has enabled a lot of that.”
Moving more efficiently
Corrales says the company deliberately contracted not because revenue collapsed, but because capability shifted.
“Right now we’re probably delivering more revenue with half the staff,” he said.
“For example, we went from a team of five designers to a team of one designer plus a handful of AI subscriptions.
“Even though we did this, output is now stronger than it was before.”
The shift is now feeding directly into how the business approaches onboarding.
“We’re freezing hiring,” he continued. “In my opinion, you’re now going to have to justify why you cannot do a job with AI.
“That’s not to say that some roles don’t remain inherently human, especially those customer-facing roles.
“But this is not about a technical transformation – this is bigger than that because you are doing an operational transformation.
“As a business owner, these are not easy decisions to make, but it gives us empowerment, it gives us more freedom.
“We want to be two steps ahead so that we can best serve our customers and that’s what we’re always trying to do.”