The economics of patience.
A short essay on how we think about unit economics when the horizon is ten years long — and why a lower CAC often beats a higher LTV.
Most direct-to-consumer brands optimize for the wrong decimal place. They model three-year cohorts, apply a generous discount rate, and justify paying twice what a customer is worth on the promise that the model will change later.
We use a different model. We ask: if this brand disappears from every paid channel tomorrow, would customers still come back? If the answer is no, we haven't built a brand — we have built an arbitrage on someone else's platform.
A customer acquired through care, not auction, compounds differently. They tell other customers. They forgive a shipping delay. They buy again on occasion two and three and four, not because we retargeted them, but because the product earned its place in their kitchen.
This is not a strategy that wins a quarter. It is a strategy that wins a decade.
