ROAS is meaningless without your margin
A 3x return sounds good until you know the margin. At 60% gross margin, 3x is comfortably profitable. At 30% margin, 3x is roughly break-even before you have paid rent, salaries or shipping — you have run a busy month for nothing.
Calculate your break-even multiple once and write it on the wall: divide 1 by your gross margin. Every campaign decision afterwards becomes simple, because you are comparing against a real threshold rather than a number that sounds impressive. The ROAS calculator will do it for you.
Sell-through is the number fashion actually runs on
Fashion is an inventory business. Revenue can look healthy while your capital sits in unsold stock in the wrong sizes, and that money is gone until it is discounted. Sell-through — the share of a drop sold at full price within its window — captures this better than any revenue figure.
Track it per drop and per size. A drop that sells 70% at full price is a success even if the total is modest; one that sells 40% and then 30% more at discount has quietly eaten your margin. This also tells you what to make more of, which is the highest-value thing marketing data can do for a fashion brand.
Repeat rate separates a brand from a shop
If every drop sells to a fresh set of strangers, you are renting attention permanently and your costs will only rise. If a growing share of each drop goes to people who bought before, you are building something — and your acquisition cost effectively falls every season.
Measure it simply: what percentage of this drop's buyers had ordered from you before? Watch that number across drops rather than obsessing over any single one. It is the clearest signal of whether the brand is compounding, and it is the number that most reliably predicts whether you will still be here in three years.