We interrupt your regularly scheduled Sean Frank “battle cry” with breaking news …
It’s not the money you make.
It’s the money you get to keep.
Sound cliché? It is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
🤑 Mehtab Bhogal shows you five ways to make your DTC brand more profitable.
🙈 Cody Plofker reveals a “hidden opportunity” to lift margin per session.
📊 Connor MacDonald shares his worse-but-better Sheet + Loom (classic).
Plus, the five biggest headlines from this week in consumer with executive summaries.
|
|
Cody Plofker
CEO, Jones Road Beauty
|
Increase Margin per Session With This Hidden Opportunity
In this day and age, we’ve got to do everything we can to improve not just revenue per session but margin per session.
Here’s one thing that works for us … confirmation-page offers from other premium brands.
It’s really like the icing on the cake – both for our customers and our bottom line — after someone completes their purchase. So, there’s no interruption in conversions.
We’ve seen great results at Jones Road Beauty!
🍰 $100k in 6 months
🍰 No extra fulfillment cost
🍰 Association with household brands — like Nike, Disney+, Booking(.)com, and 400 more
Aftersell is offering free audits to find hidden opportunities in your online stores. Give it a try!
|
|
Mehtab Bhogal
Karta Ventures
|
Five Ways to Make Your Business More Profitable
-
Supply Chain
- Price Increases
- Sense of Urgency
- Wasteful Marketing
- Send More Emails
1. Supply Chain
Excellent terms or pricing with a vendor can transform your business overnight.
- Get on a plane
I’m always surprised by how many companies haven’t visited their suppliers. Meeting face-to-face makes you an actual person and surfaces opportunities that would otherwise be invisible or impossible.
- Find redundant vendors
Existing suppliers will rarely negotiate in good faith until you turn them off. For sourcing, you should be speaking with 30–40+ vendors per product.
- Understand their cost structure
Exporters have access to government-subsidized cheap financing. And they hold products at their cost, not yours. So, ask them to hold more finished goods on hand.
- Reduce costs without asking
Instead, make a “new” product together or reengineer existing products to remove waste and reach a lower price point — this is due to “big-man” culture in other countries.
Quick Wins
Get better net terms. Use contracts to generate a sense of fairness. Provide suppliers with an updated demand forecast.
2. Price Increases
Makes the business easier to run; higher prices fire your worst customers and attract higher-quality shoppers.
- Raise prices (or test)
Some businesses can outright increase prices. Others require testing. Keep in mind, there are usually “cliffs” — as in, I can raise prices 15% without losing a lot of volume, but at 20%, I might lose a lot.
- Reduce product quantity
Whether you want to call it “shrinkflation” or “price pack architecture” (i.e., dropping the no. of items in a bundle from 5 to 4 without dropping the price), it’s all the same. It tends to work much better than price increases, too.
- Unbundle “freebies”
At one company, we found removing a lot of the free services and add-ons that used to come with kit products, then displaying them as upsells, resulted in what amounted to a ~20% price increase on that product line without impacting conversions.
- Ship less for free
Increasing cutoffs for free shipping forces more gross profit per average order due to how ecommerce shipping dynamics work. You can also increase shipping costs for anything under your free cutoff.
Quick Wins
Change your return policy. “Force” minimum pack sizes, kits, or bundling (e.g., True Classic packs + buy more, save more).
3. Sense of Urgency
This is one of the main jobs of a founder and immediately gets more out of your employees: 15%–30% jump.
- Set short deadlines
Long deadlines never work. If there is a long deadline, break it into short sprints. Question all dates given and the logic for them when an employee gives you a date.
- Wipe out non-value-add tasks
Employees make a list of what they are doing each week, then look at how much is not adding value. That work can be automated or given to a cheaper employee. Always ask what action items are coming out of meetings.
- Never give out too many resources
Time, money, people. Be precious with these. Creative solutions won’t happen when people think they can just pay for a SaaS instead of learning to do a vlookup.
Quick Wins
Bake a sense of urgency into your core values and fire everyone without it. Use the EOS GWC Tool — it’s free.
4. Wasteful Marketing
The benefits of cutting wasteful marketing are self-evident; most revolve around one form or another of “brand.”
- Eliminate branded search
This is particularly true on Amazon, where something like 98% of branded searches result in purchases from that brand. Similar on Google, where you should use brand exclusions and negative keywords.
- Don’t fall for big-brand defaults
The biggest spenders on ad platforms aren’t DTC, direct-response marketers. They’re genuine enterprises, and that’s who the platforms are built for. Unless you’re well into nine-figures, non-conversion objectives are money pits (apologies to the Marketing Operators). So are ads that never achieve first-order profitability.
- Distinguish brand from “brag”
That’s Sean’s phrase: “Brand marketing is just BRAG marketing.” A less binary take would be to separate one-year EBITDA growth from five-year goals. If you’re focused on the former, brand marketing won’t help.
Quick Wins
Most marketing experimentation is waste; money should be allocated towards more shots on goal for product + PMF.
5. Send More Emails
This last one is really tactical. A lot of small or medium brands — especially those still run by the founders — are guilty of it.
If you’re sending one a week, start sending seven. Even send twice a day sometimes.
It will not hurt you. People won’t unsubscribe en masse; they’re not going to care because they won’t notice.
You’ll see revenue go straight up. And it’s virtually free revenue. You can run a holdout test if you want. But you don’t need to.
It works literally 100% of the time. If it doesn’t, you can complain to me on X, and I’ll send you something.
Finance Operators: 01 Don't Get Rugged
Fortunes are Made in Recessions
Why Meta Purchase Conversion Isn’t Enough: Rethinking Ad Optimization for Growth
BONUS EPISODE Data is a Business Problem, Not Just a Marketing Problem
|
|
Connor MacDonald
CMO, Ridge
|
How to Make Money With Worse Results
Over my eight years at Ridge, we’ve had one consistent belief: Results get worse over time.
It could be rising costs, saturating audiences, unstable Facebook performance, or maybe just a healthy dose of pessimism.
To help you calculate how much money you can make at how bad of results …
Here’s a spreadsheet calculator + a Loom walkthrough (excuse my dog snoring in the background).
Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest consumer-news headlines.
1. Stripes Begins Raising Seventh Fund: SEC
According to an SEC filing, growth equity firm Stripes is raising its seventh flagship VC fund. The New York-based firm was founded by Ken Fox in 2008 and has $7 billion of assets under management. Stripes has an impressive consumer portfolio. Their previous investments include Siete, Vuori, On, Khaite, Kosas, and many others.
2. Dr. Mike Israetel Launches Genius Shot: Stack3d
Mike Israetel, a competitive bodybuilder and fitness content creator, launched a protein shot brand called Genius Shot. Each 3 oz Genius Shot contains 23g of whey protein, BCAAs, and zero fat or sugar. Israetel is best known as the founder of RP Strength and has established a huge audience on YouTube and Instagram.
The protein shot category is quickly picking up steam. Last year, Nestle launched two under its Orgain and Boost brands.
3. Forward Consumer Partners Acquires Cleaning Brand: Business Wire
Forward Consumer Partners has acquired Bar Keepers Friend, an iconic household cleaning brand founded in 1882 by George William Hoffman. Over the past decade, Bar Keepers Friend has grown revenue at a double-digit CAGR.
This is the first acquisition outside the food & beverage category for Forward Consumer Partners.
4. Campari Sells Howler Head: The Spirits Business
Italian spirits firm Campari Group has sold flavored whiskey brand Howler Head for an undisclosed sum. The buyer is Infinium Spirits. Catalyst Spirits launched Howler Head in 2020, and Campari Group acquired a 15% stake for $15M in 2022.
5. Athletic Brewing Did More Than $130M in 2024: Fast Company
Athletic Brewing — the tenth-largest craft brewer in the United States — generated more than $130M in sales in 2024. The company is also preparing to open a third dedicated brewing facility, which will double capacity to nearly 1.2 million barrels.
Fixin’ for Sean Frank content?
Next week will be a heater on the “state of ecommerce.”
But in the meantime, he posted an epic thread …
Even better, Sean also dropped a full video breakdown on his own YouTube channel.
Hopefully, that tides you over until next week!
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓 Executive Editor
PS (Disclaimer): Special thanks to Aftersell for sponsoring this week’s newsletter.
