Started with $3000 in founder’s capital and turned it into $250M in revenue.

In 2019, Ryan Bartlett along with Nick Ventura and Matt Winnick started the brand “True Classic” out of frustration with T-shirt companies charging a premium for short-term poor-quality tees.

The purpose behind the brand is to make every man look and feel good.

They started with just tees as their product market fit, which they have expanded to 15 categories.

Here’s what we can learn from this brand:

The Profit Mindset from Day 1

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Unlike Today's DTC Brands, they didn’t like the idea of burning cash

Ben Yahalom (President of True Classic) said that, They wanted to make a real business out of it, and profit is everything in business.

They found out their break-even ROAS (1/Your profit margin). And they would stop any channel, creative, or platform performing below it.

Their motto is “Acquisition is Growth, and Retention is Profit,” which means without retention, they’re losing money. So they always make sure the user they are acquiring is profitable in the long term by keeping balance between acquisition & retention.

How Tapping This Untapped Segment Gave Them More Than 50% Growth

Women were the untapped market for them which gave them 50% growth.

After studying various segments of their initial customers, they decided to give women's segment a try, including wifes, girlfriends, daughters, sisters, and friends. They changed all their advertising angles around women who wanted to buy it for their men. This gave them more than a 50% jump in sales.

This deep understanding of their customer segments and finding the opportunity where no one else was marketing helped them achieve real growth.

Profitability Came from Knowing the Numbers

“What Gets Measured Gets Managed”

Ryan and his team knew this very well. They dug deep into their numbers, the costs, the profit, and ROI.

Ben Yahalom said that they care most about the following basic things:

Knowing the P&L Deep

Profit and loss are the essence of business financing.

As business owners, they make monthly P&L sheets and observe them daily.

From cost per acquisition, the cost of Shopify, and the cost of other tools they use like Triple Whale, Tap Cart, Tolstoy, etc., every software efficiency they measured with a return on investment mindset. Even if any creative performed, they saw it as a good ROI, and if it didn't, they would mark those costs and efforts of those creatives as a negative ROI.

Basically, they focused on basic things such as blended ROAS, ROI, and EBITDA margins.

Balance Between Acquisition and Retention to Be Profitable

Acquisition is growth, and retention is profit.

Most D2C brands just go highly on acquisition and keep the loop open where their retention is less than 25%. Not having a retention machine won’t allow you to become profitable since most of your customers won’t buy from you again, and the cost of acquiring will be a loss to the company. The founding team made sure they have a retention machine built first and then moved on to acquisition.

They maintain a ratio of almost around 40-50% in retention rate, and 50% of revenue comes from acquisition.

Average Revenue Per User

Making out the most of your Buck is knowing your Average Gross Revenue Per user.

Ben & team focused on the gross revenue they make over the span of lifetime of a consumer & how can they scale that revenue per user. These thing they achieved through cross ells & Upsells.

Their Creatively Created Combos played a Great role in increasing their AOV which Directly increased their Average Gross Revenue Per User.

Increasing ARPU was very helpful for them in Increasing ROI which made the rising costs of acquisition less impactful.

Revenue From Different Segments & Cohorts

20% of customers will give you the 80% of Revenue.

They Figured out who are their best segments & Cohorts. which made it worthwhile for them to figure it out who are the customers to spend the most upon. for example they found out that their tees customers who bought in april last year have the highest retention rate, conversion rate and engagement with the brand. this gave them a data to allow them to spend most on emails, sms targeting these customers because they are now confident on spending upon these customers.

Hence Understanding segments and cohorts is something that is often overlooked in the DTC space, which they have extensively cracked.

Creative is underrated and media buying is overrated

A good content can completely scale the business. ex: (Dollar shave club)

And for creating good content, angles and messages Creativity is the essence to create that. especially after IOS.14.5 every major platform like Facebook is going broad. This makes the media buying super easy so we can focus more on our Angles, Hooks & Creatives. Even today if you see their facebook ads, they spend a good amount of time & efforts more on testing messages & content.

Every modern DTC brand is in the business of gaining attention & for that a good amount of creativity requires.

The below video is their recent ad which got 11m views just on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4m7XwIaOyo

Understanding their Fits

Product market fit

The market was filled with highly premium prices tshirts. Further the cheaper once haven't had that good quality.

They found their product market fit here with the objective to make a sooo goood tshirt & making it affordable + accessible for everyone. They closely looked at the problem mens were facing while wearing a t-shirts where they found out that the fit from stomach was highly tight and losse at the upper chest.

They Introduce a t-shirts to the market which makes men look completely fit from all the sides & not baggy.

Message Market fit

How you communicate your value proposition makes the difference.

Their Messages to women’s audience were “Perfect sexy tees for your men” While for men’s they used “Clothing that makes you feel confident & comfortable to your body at the same time’

the best one “Tees that are tight in from the right places”. these were the sub content buckets under one bucket which was “It’s not you, it’s your t-shirt”

The way they have demonstrated these messages into their ads were highly Relevant to the audience they were targeting.

Watch the how are they communicating their value prop in their ads below.

Channel market fit

After product and channel market fit, finding 1 channel fit is crucial to scale.

Meta is their backbone for scaling trueclassic tees. Upto 80-90% of their direct revenue comes from meta ads. They figured out how the channel works, how the audience is hanging out on the channel & how to gain their attention. The Whole team created a content personally crafted for Instagram and facebook which looked like native to the platform.

After Optimizing on 1 channel they are now scaling to youtube & Tiktok as their 2nd primary platforms.

Consistent Brand Tone of voice

Consistency is the king when it comes to position your brand in Top of the mind of your customers.

The way the brand communicate with the customers in the quirky humor, Bold & Strong Opinion tone of voice makes the brand touch more human to consumers. & they do it consistently same to all of their platforms. Their Jester personality gives consumers the essence of fun, happiness, Laughter, togetherness & Positivity.

The Brand has successfully given the consumers the touch of their human personality which makes many people still connected to them.

Growth Focused Execution

Analytical Strategy & Creative Execution

As the famous quote goes, "Creativity without strategy is called art, creative with strategy is called advertising."

True Classic Tees exemplifies this by combining a highly creative approach with a data-driven analytical strategy, allowing them to optimize their advertising campaigns and achieve exceptional growth.

They invest heavily in creating visually appealing content, then use data to analyze its effectiveness and refine their approach accordingly. This enables them to continually improve their advertising and scale their business.

Not relying on paid media alone

While paid media can be effective, True Classic Tees knows that it's not enough to rely on ads alone. By focusing on content creation, community management, and organic traffic, they're able to build a traffic machine that drives high lifetime value customers to their site.

Conclusion: Key takeaways

If you're doing business profit is the Must to grow. Business without a profit is not a business.
Understand your customer lifetime value and focus on increasing your average gross revenue per user & Retention Rate
Humanize Your brand with people to make a real connection.
Identify your best segments and cohorts to prioritize your marketing budget.
Emphasize creativity in your advertising strategy to stand out in a crowded market.
Tailor your messaging to different segments and channels to improve message-market fit.
Build a consistent tone of voice that resonates with your audience.
Combine analytical strategy with creative execution for sustainable growth.
Don't rely solely on paid media - focus on building a traffic machine through content, community management, and organic traffic.

By following these principles, you can create a successful growth strategy for your own DTC brand.

How This 100% Bootstrapped DTC Brand Grew to 9 Figures Profitably in Just 2 Years.

Started with $3000 in founder’s capital and turned it into $250M in revenue. In 2019, Rya

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