This newsletter has been quiet for a while.

The eCom world has definitely not.

Over the last months, I’ve had countless conversations with founders and operators, looked through a lot of brand data, and collected more observations, questions and learnings than I could fit into one newsletter.

One topic keeps coming up (and it's no surprise): CACs.

More specifically, brands asking how to stop it from rising as they scale.

For me that’s the not always the right question to ask. So we’ll cover another one today. With an exact approach a lot of brands never start working on.

Plus, I’ll share our H1 eCom benchmarks.

Let’s get into it:

Recently, I spoke with an eCom founder who has grown from €10M to €80M in the last three years.

His CAC has gone up 30% over that time.

Annoying? Absolutely. But we both agreed it's the wrong thing to obsess over.

Here is the uncomfortable part about scale:

CAC almost always goes up.

CPMs rise. Competition rises. And the further you scale, the more you pay to reach people who were never sitting in-market waiting for you.

You can fight that. And you should.

Just know that you won't win that fight.

If the only way your business can grow is with a stable CAC, your growth will always be capped.

So the real question isn't "how do I keep my CAC down.".

Because a lower CAC only buys you a better month.

It's: "How do I build a business that can afford a higher CAC?"

A business that can carry a higher CAC is what gets you past €100M.

And the answer is always by generating a higher CLV.

These are the three levers to pull, in order of leverage:

1. Higher repurchase rate

This is the biggest and most obvious lever by far. Every extra order from a customer you already paid to acquire is almost pure CLV. If more of your customers come back a second and third time, the CAC you paid up front simply matters less.

2. Higher AOV

More revenue per order lifts CLV without touching acquisition at all. Bundles, the right upsells, a smarter product mix - you're getting more out of the same customer on the same visit.

3. Better margins

More contribution margin on every order you already make. This is the most quiet one - and it's the one I don't see a lot of brands actually working on.

So let's talk about lever three. Because it might be the easiest room you have left. 👇

This sounds a bit too easy.

But if you look at every line item despite marketing in your P&L, 5% better on each of them doesn't make you 5% more profitable.

It makes you roughly 30% more profitable.

Most operators treat the P&L as fixed. Marketing is the only lever anyone touches - everyone's convinced that's where the leverage is.

And they're right. It's just not always the easiest lever to pull.

The easier points are often sitting in every other line.

Your P&L is a waterfall - now look at this:

Imagine you shave 5% off each line. Not 5 percentage points. 5% relative.

Discounts from 5% to 4.75%. COGS from 40% to 38%. Return rate down a fraction.

No single one of those makes it into a board deck.

But every one of them is achievable.

And because it's a waterfall, each improvement stacks on top of the one above it.

A brand running 12% EBITDA lands closer to 16%.

That's not 5% more profit. That's ~30% more.

Where to start (pick two lines, not seven):

You obviously can't do this forever. Margins have a floor.

But most brands just never start.

And here is why this matters for everything above:

Those extra EBITDA points are exactly the budget that lets you sustain a higher CAC and keep scaling.

Every operator eventually asks the same question: "Is it just us, or is everyone seeing this?"

So we did the work and pulled the data across hundreds of our brands, broke it down by industry, and tracked how the core metrics moved through the first half of 2026.

You can access the deck for free here: 📊 June 2026 eCom Benchmarks

If you're a Klar user, you can directly compare your own numbers against the industry in Klar already.

If not (yet), we'll give you the option to do the same pretty soon, too.

So, stay tuned.