DTC · Beauty & personal care
Scaling spend was hiding a $134k annual margin leak.
This marketing & margin audit surfaced $134k in recurring annual margin in a DTC / Ecommerce business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 6 days.
The business
This was a $9M direct to consumer beauty and personal care brand, two years into an aggressive paid social push. On the surface everything pointed to a success story: revenue climbed quarter on quarter, reported ROAS held comfortably above target, and two prospecting campaigns were credited as the engine of that growth. Leadership was preparing to increase budget on exactly those campaigns heading into peak season.
What triggered the audit
The finance lead raised a quiet contradiction nobody wanted to touch: revenue was growing month after month, yet the bank balance refused to follow. The audit was commissioned to rebuild true contribution margin per order on the flagship prospecting campaigns, loading in the shipping, returns and payment processing costs the headline ROAS figure had always ignored.
What the audit found
Rebuilt from the invoice up, the picture inverted completely. The brand’s two largest prospecting campaigns, the ones celebrated in every board deck, were buying revenue below break even once shipping, returns and payment fees were charged against each order. Gross ROAS looked healthy only because it stopped measuring at the sale; it never followed the order through fulfillment or the stubbornly high return rate on color cosmetics. In practice, every additional dollar poured into those two campaigns was quietly destroying margin, and because they were the growth story, scaling them made the underlying problem worse rather than better. Across the year the leak totaled roughly $134k, hidden entirely inside a number everyone trusted as proof the strategy was working.
What we changed
Rebuilt both campaigns around contribution margin measured after shipping, returns and payment fees, so success is defined by profit per order rather than gross ROAS.
Cut or reworked the specific audience and creative combinations that only ever converted below break even, while protecting the pockets that genuinely paid back.
Installed a margin after returns guardrail into the media plan, so no campaign can scale past the point at which each incremental order starts losing money.
Gave finance and marketing a single shared view of contribution after returns, closing the gap between the ad dashboard and the P&L.
The result
$134k a year recovered, an annual figure equal to 23× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee, and the single largest leak in this engagement. What should stop any growth focused leader cold is that these were the two campaigns celebrated in every board deck; the leak survived two years precisely because the dashboards called them winners. If your best performers are judged on ROAS rather than margin after returns, the same loss is very likely hiding in your account and compounding every month it runs. A fixed fee audit surfaces it in days, senior reviewed, before you scale the problem.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 6 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
What the client said
$134k a year found in 6 days
Contribution margin on the two top campaigns: −7% → +9%
“Revenue grew and cash didn't. Victoria rebuilt margin per order after shipping, returns and payment fees, and our two biggest prospecting campaigns were losing money on every sale. We stopped scaling them.”
Victoria MillerSenior Auditor · signed this audit off