From Complexity to Clarity: Building a Profitable eCommerce Portfolio
Profitability. It’s the buzzword echoing across every boardroom in eCommerce today. With scale becoming less about chasing growth at any cost and more about building resilient, margin-strong businesses, brands are rethinking how they operate and more importantly, how they measure success.
In a recent Leaf Collectivo podcast episode, Laurence Booth-Clibborn, co-founder of The Mothership, offered a candid look into how his team has transformed a diverse portfolio of health and wellness brands into a finely tuned profit engine. But what stood out wasn’t just the operational tactics or channel strategy; it was the underlying philosophy: profitability starts with clarity.
The Complexity Trap: Why Scale Can Work Against You
When The Mothership launched in 2021, the thesis was clear: acquire small Amazon-first wellness brands with strong product-market fit and scale them using a centralised operations team. But like many others who rode the Amazon aggregator wave in 2020–2021, they quickly discovered a fundamental flaw.
“People missed what makes eCommerce brands win: understanding the customer, the product, and the supply chain.” – Laurence Booth-Clibborn
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when every brand has its own DNA, running everything through a single marketplace or funnel created fragility, not scale. The result? A pivot to a multi-channel model and a rethink of what it meant to build lasting value.
The Five Levers of eCommerce Profitability
What emerged from that reflection was a focus on operational clarity. And it boiled down to five core levers that Laurence and his team use to diagnose and drive performance across their portfolio:
- Product Margin – Solid unit economics are non-negotiable.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – You can’t scale if you’re overpaying for attention.
- Average Order Value (AOV) – Increasing AOV is one of the most controllable levers for improving payback periods.
- Lifetime Value (LTV) – Retention isn’t just a metric—it’s a profit centre.
- Cash Conversion Cycle – A brand that can’t manage inventory and cash flow won’t last, no matter how good its marketing is.
These five levers became the blueprint for simplicity and repeatable success.
Standardisation as a Superpower
One of the most interesting shifts The Mothership made was moving from treating each brand uniquely to standardising how performance is measured.
Every brand is now tracked using the same P&L framework, broken down into CM1, CM2, and CM3 contributions. This consistency enables apples-to-apples comparisons, better forecasting, and more informed resource allocation.
“You have to push for simplicity constantly. We’ve unified our language, and now we can actually see the whole business.”
Rather than getting lost in the nuance of individual brands, they focus on the common drivers of performance and only then tailor interventions where it really matters.
Building Profit From the Ground Up
Profit isn’t something you get at the end, it’s something you design into the business.
For The Mothership, that meant rethinking how new brands were integrated. Instead of just plugging them into a pre-built platform, every acquisition is now mapped against how well it fits the group’s model for profitability.
They apply a dual lens:
Brand-level profitability: Is the brand structurally profitable, and if not, which of the five levers are misfiring?
Group-level profitability: What does the brand add (or subtract) from the total profit pool once platform costs are accounted for?
LTV as the North Star
In an age of rising acquisition costs and tighter budgets, LTV isn’t just a helpful KPI, it’s the heartbeat of the business. For consumables and supplements in particular, it’s where profit lives.
That means product experience and customer journey become strategic tools, not just service touchpoints. For example, small tweaks, like allowing customers to gift, skip, or delay a subscription delivery, can significantly reduce churn while driving up referral acquisition.
These micro-optimisations compound. When brands zoom in on what keeps customers engaged, happy, and buying, the lifetime value equation naturally improves.
“LTV is a measure not just of your ability to get them to buy more, but of their desire to do so.”
Culture, Teams, and Decision-Making
Profitability isn’t just a spreadsheet goal, it’s a cultural shift. Laurence underscored how empowering team members to make smart decisions, grounded in the business model and performance levers, was critical to unlocking growth.
Rather than relying on centralised decision-making, The Mothership invested in clarity and accountability at all levels. From CRM to logistics, each function understands how it contributes to CM3 and ultimately EBITDA.
This decentralisation, combined with clearly defined success metrics, creates an agile operating model that can scale without adding friction.
Key Takeaways: Profitability Isn’t Optional
Whether you’re running one brand or managing a portfolio, profitability must be built into the foundation, not treated as a quarterly target. The Mothership’s approach offers a clear roadmap for how to do just that:
- Focus on the five essential metrics: Product Margin, CAC, AOV, LTV, and Cash Conversion.
- Standardise your reporting and performance frameworks to create clarity across teams.
- Build customer-centricity into every part of the journey to improve LTV and reduce churn.
- View complexity as the enemy and simplicity as the strategy.
In a market that increasingly rewards sustainable business models over vanity growth, these aren’t just best practices, they’re survival tactics.
Looking to benchmark your own profitability strategy? Start by breaking down your funnel through the lens of these five levers. Chances are, your next margin unlock is hiding in plain sight.