In a landscape where ad costs are rising, acquisition is harder, and attribution is more fragmented than ever, many brands are waking up to a hard truth: ROAS alone doesn’t equal profit.
In episode 8 of The Leaf Colectivo, we sat down with Tim from The Bottle Club to unpack what profitability looks like in 2025. His team has spent the last seven years growing a multi-brand eCommerce business in one of the toughest categories – without the luxury of venture backing or deep margins.
Their success hasn’t come from flashy growth hacks or viral ads. It comes from understanding their numbers, obsessing over customer behaviour and designing for sustainable profit.
ROAS Is Just the Starting Point
Tim’s team started where most do, chasing a flat ROAS target. For them, it was 10x. But that number quickly lost meaning as they dug deeper into attribution and the actual cost of scaling.
A 10 ROAS on Facebook isn’t the same as a 10 ROAS on Google and neither tells you what’s left in the bank at the end of the month.
Instead of relying solely on platform dashboards, they built a daily P&L, tracking everything from warehouse costs to unit-level profitability. It was tedious, but necessary.
The insight: Don’t measure success purely on ROAS. Measure it on net profit.
Attribution Lies, So Build for Insight
Attribution will never be perfect. But that’s not an excuse to ignore it, it’s a call to design better systems.
Bottle Club shut off paid ads completely to understand the true lift those channels were driving. Sales dipped, but not nearly as much as attribution models had implied.
That experiment uncovered a critical truth.
If a channel claims 60% of your revenue but turning it off only drops sales by 20%, you’re overpaying for attribution.
Rather than chase perfect attribution, Tim’s team now focuses on understanding the full customer journey and what role each channel plays within it.
Know Your Customers (and Segment Ruthlessly)
One of the smartest things Bottle Club did was add a mandatory checkout question:
“Who are you buying for?”
Answers include:
- Myself
- As a gift
- Hosting
- Trade
This one question delivered a game-changing insight: 50% of orders were gifts. That changed how they thought about repeat purchases, CRM, and lifetime value.
Why does that matter?
Because if you treat a gifting customer like a personal-use customer, you’ll waste your marketing budget. If you understand their intent, you can personalise follow-ups, plan remarketing more effectively, and increase lifetime value.
Retention Beats Acquisition, If You Design for It
One of the most expensive habits in eCommerce is re-acquiring customers you already had.
Instead of pushing more spend into new customer acquisition, Bottle Club now focuses on:
- Lifecycle email flows based on category
- Segment-specific product education
- Referral and loyalty incentives
- Deep post-purchase content around gifting, rare products, and discovery
As Tim puts it:
If you already have their attention, nurture it. Don’t just show them another Google Shopping ad.
This approach isn’t just good retention, it’s smart profit design.
Profitability Is a System, Not a Tactic
The most important takeaway from the conversation?
Profitability doesn’t come from a single tactic, it’s a design decision.
From filtering by whiskey cask type to remembering a customer’s reason for purchase, every part of Bottle Club’s business is built with margin and customer experience in mind.
They’ve even gone so far as to segment campaigns around personal context, like asking customers whether they’d like to opt out of marketing during sensitive periods like Mother’s or Father’s Day.
This is what building for longevity looks like.
Final Thoughts
Too many brands treat ROAS as a finish line. But the most resilient eCommerce businesses in 2025 know better.
They understand:
- Where profit is made (and lost)
- Why customer context matters
- How to build systems that scale sustainably
As Tim said best:
“Being wrong is one of the strongest things you can do, because it means you’re learning.”
Hear more on The Leaf Colectivo
Understanding that ROAS isn’t profit and designing for long-term profitability was a central theme in our recent episode with Tim from The Bottle Club. It’s a deep, experience-rich conversation about what actually drives sustainable success in eCommerce today.
Want to dig deeper? Listen to the full episode on Spotify or YouTube.