We hit a 42% profit margin in May!

May was our DTC brand's most profitable month ever!

We made $69k in profit on $161k of revenue (42.85% profit, after salaries).

So I wanted to share everything we did to make it happen:

*Long artistic pause…*

You know that feeling in DTC? The constant scramble? The 'pedal to the metal' just to keep the lights on, let alone grow? The pressure to always be launching new ads and keeping up the Joneses?

I know I do.

But what if I told that we did nothing special in May, absolutely nothing, to hit our most profitable month ever? Hear me out…

I'm a one-man band in the marketing department, and I'm by no means a genius. I've sent 2 email campaigns/week and one-shotted a few new ads while working in this business ~2 days per week.

I don't say that to sound cool. I know we're leaving a lot of money on the table, and I sometimes wish we did more. But the family part of our "little" family business is burnt out. So we're currently doing everything MVP-style and prioritizing efficiency over perfection.

So, how did we do it? We did by being boring and everything but sexy. For the last ~8-12 months, we’ve been trimming the fat (OPEX) and slowly decreasing our inventory so we, in turn, could decrease budgets. And that has done two almost magical things:

1. Instead of having to generate $1500 in margin to break even every day in our online stores, we now just have to generate ~$400. This means we default to making money, more or less no matter what. The only way we don't is if we ruin it ourselves by running unprofitable ads.

2. I can't describe how easy Meta ads feels when you don't have to put the pedal to the metal every day to hit some arbitrary sales number defined by what we did last year. We can just trust our bid caps, totally stress-free.

In day-to-day terms, it means that we've gone from struggling to be first-order profitable at the scale our budgets previously demanded to consistently have ~$10 of margin per new customer. Talk about a totally different cash flow.

Again, I'm not writing this to sound cool or one of those guru's making a lot of money without working.

I'm writing this to tell you that maybe DTC wouldn't be so difficult if we focused more on making money and less on selling more to sound cool.

What do you think?

Mathias