Selling direct hands you the retail margin and the retailer's job at the same time. We build the numbers that decide how fast that can be scaled — contribution per order, cohort behaviour, payback period — then run demand creation, capture and retention against them, rather than against a monthly return figure that says nothing about cash.
Payback period governs how fast you can grow
(a brand can be profitable over eighteen months and still run out of cash growing quickly)
Cohorts, not monthly revenue
(a customer acquired in March who returns in September appears as September revenue unless spend is linked to the cohort that produced it)
Your own data is the durable asset
(differentiated conversion values teach platforms to find customers worth having instead of cheap ones)
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The advantages are real and immediate. The obligation that comes with them is the part that decides whether the model works.
You inherited the retailer's job
Selling direct hands over the retail margin and the work that margin paid for — discovery, implied validation and demand aggregation. The margin appears immediately; the cost of replacing that demand arrives as a budget nobody planned.
The margin gain is smaller than it looks
Fulfilment, returns, payment fees and customer service move onto your profit and loss. The realistic version is a better margin, not a doubled one — and that difference sets what acquisition can cost.
Order value moves faster than acquisition cost
Raising average order value is usually the quickest lever and the least explored, because it works at the moment of purchase rather than requiring new customers. Cost per acquisition has the least headroom of the three.
Which is why the first conversation is about contribution and cohorts rather than channels. Without those two numbers, any budget figure is a guess wearing a plan's clothing.
Creating demand, converting it, and building the repeat behaviour that decides what a customer is worth — with the measurement that ties all three together.
Demand creation across paid social
Meta, TikTok and Pinterest doing the work no retail shelf is doing for you any more — judged on incremental contribution and new-customer cost rather than on last-click return.
Search and feed-driven demand capture
Converting the intent that creation generates, with brand separated from non-brand so the account average stops hiding what it costs to reach someone who has never heard of you.
Cohort reporting and payback modelling
Customers grouped by acquisition month with cumulative contribution tracked over time. Without this the maximum you can safely spend is unknown, and budgets get set by what feels affordable.
Retention, email and SMS
The lever with the most compounding and the slowest response. Replenishment, membership and lifecycle sequences built as infrastructure rather than as campaigns run when revenue dips.
Order value and offer structure
Bundling, thresholds and post-purchase offers — the fastest route to a shorter payback period, and the one most brands examine last.
Value-based measurement
Contribution rather than revenue fed back into bidding, so platforms optimise toward repeat customers instead of treating a one-off discount buyer as an identical outcome.
We start from contribution, not revenue
The first number we ask for is what remains from an average order after cost of goods, shipping, fees and returns. Everything downstream — target cost, budget, growth rate — is derived from it.
Payback period sets the growth rate
How long the business can wait to be repaid determines how fast it can safely scale. This is a cash question before it is a marketing one, and it is usually unanswered.
Growth, retention and measurement in one model
Paid media, lifecycle and cohort economics are not separate reports. We feed differentiated values back into platforms so the system finds customers worth having, not the cheapest possible buyer.
It suits categories with repeat purchase, adequate margin and a genuine reason to choose the brand — and suits one-off commodity purchases badly.
It makes sense when
Not yet, when
Scaling acquisition before order value and repeat rate are addressed compounds a loss rather than a gain — which is why the sequence is fixed.
Establish contribution and cohorts
Real contribution per order after all variable costs, and customers grouped by acquisition month with cumulative value tracked. This comes first because every later number depends on it.
Fix order value and the repeat mechanic
Bundling, thresholds and the lifecycle sequence the category actually supports. Both multiply the return on acquisition, which is why they precede scaling it.
Scale acquisition against a known ceiling
With payback modelled, spend can increase against a target that reflects what the business can finance rather than what looked affordable last month.
Customer data is the point of selling direct — it belongs in your systems, and we will tell you when growth should slow.
Your data, your customers
Ad accounts, customer data and the lifecycle platform stay in your ownership. The first-party asset is the point — it does not sit with us.
Management fee, not a cut of spend
Paid for running the programme, not a share of what flows through it. Scaling has to fit your payback period, not our invoice.
We will say when to slow down
If payback is longer than the business can finance, the right advice is to grow more slowly. That is an unpopular thing for an agency to be paid to say.
A cross-section of work across premium e-commerce, marketplaces, local lead generation and ticketed experiences. Each story shows how the right strategy, capabilities and operating cadence come together around the business model.
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The way we work is consistent across every scope: the business objective comes first, each capability has a defined role, and decisions are made against real business numbers.
Direct strategist contact
You work with the person responsible for direction, priorities and delivery — not a layer of account managers.
Infrastructure on your side
Accounts, analytics, automations, creative and data stay yours from day one — no dependency on the agency.
A daily decision rhythm
We connect marketing and analytics data in one operational view, so evidence turns into priorities and action quickly.
No long lock-ins
A 14-day rolling notice, a clear billing model and a clean handover if you decide to stop.
DTC marketing is demand generation for a brand selling directly to end customers with no retailer or distributor in between. Its defining feature is that the brand carries the full burden of creating demand — the discovery and implied validation a retail shelf used to supply — in exchange for the retail margin, the customer relationship and first-party data. That trade is what makes payback period, rather than monthly return on ad spend, the governing metric.
Ecommerce describes the sales channel; DTC describes the absence of an intermediary. A brand can sell online without being DTC — through a marketplace, for example — and the economics differ. In DTC the brand pays for every visit, owns the customer data, and can afford a higher acquisition cost only to the degree that repeat purchase and order value support it.
There is no universal figure, because the answer depends on how growth is financed rather than on a benchmark. The practical rule is that payback must be shorter than the period the business can fund without strain — a brand growing from cash flow needs a materially shorter payback than one with external funding. What matters is that the number is known, since it sets the safe growth rate.
It is viable where the category supports repeat purchase, the margin is wide enough to absorb acquisition, and there is a genuine reason to choose the brand. What has become unviable is DTC as a pure paid-acquisition play on thin margins with no retention mechanic — the model that worked when media was cheap. The levers that still work are order value and repeat rate, both of which reduce dependence on the auction.
Most successful ones do, and the hybrid question is about sequencing rather than ideology. Marketplaces supply trust and reach that a new brand lacks, at the cost of the customer relationship and the data. The useful decision is which customer relationships the brand needs to own directly, and how long borrowed trust is worth renting.
Two things: contribution per order net of all variable costs, and repeat behaviour by acquisition cohort. Almost every other decision — target acquisition cost, budget, growth rate, which channels deserve investment — is derived from those. Reporting revenue by calendar month, which is the default in most brands, cannot answer any of them.
Tell us about the brand, average order value and what remains after shipping and returns. We'll come back on payback period, which lever moves it fastest, and what that means for budget.
