We pulled the trailing twelve months of P&L data on 63 DTC brands and sorted them by profit margin. Three of the four gaps are not where you'd expect.
That is a 12 point gap before a single dollar of media is spent. The losers are shipping a product that cannot fund its own acquisition.
Cost of delivery is flat across aMER bands: 47.6% against 46.3%. The gap is media efficiency, not a better product.
Split by fixed cost load, contribution margin is identical. Profit is not. They are losing on overhead they never grew into.
Across all 57 brands with cohort data, repeat rate has no relationship with profit at all. The correlation is -0.17 and not significant. Split the high-retention brands by gross margin and the reason shows up.
High-retention brands run a 1.2 aMER against 2.4 for everyone else. They halve front-end efficiency on the strength of the repeat rate. With a healthy margin they get away with it. Without one, it compounds.
Those two cells hold 8 and 7 brands. Directional, not conclusive. The negative cell is influenced by a handful of extreme brands, and the repeat rate metric counts subscription cadence alongside genuine retention.
Median estimated profit margin per quadrant, roughly 14 brands in each. Gross margin is worth 15 to 21 points on its own. aMER is worth 8 to 15. Together they are worth 29.
Cost of delivery, aMER, fixed cost load, and where your contribution margin actually leaks. Backed into from your own numbers, not a template.
Book an auditFREE. 45 MINUTES. YOUR NUMBERS, NOT OURS.63 direct-to-consumer brands from Kynship's proforma database, each with at least six months of trailing P&L data. Brands were ranked by estimated net profit margin and split into thirds. "Winners" is the top third, "losers" the bottom third.
aMER is total revenue attributable to new customers divided by ad spend. Cost of delivery covers COGS, shipping, fulfilment and payment processing. Repeat rate is cumulative repeat orders per new customer over six months, so a figure above 1.0 means more than one repeat order per acquired customer.
Every figure is a median taken independently, so the cost lines above do not sum exactly to the profit margin of each group. Profit is estimated from modelled fixed costs rather than audited accounts, and the trailing twelve month windows do not all cover the same calendar period. Most of these brands were audited rather than managed by Kynship.