Our portfolio model significantly increases revenues, decreases operating expenses, and establishes brand longevity.

Our strategy reflects what traditional luxury holding companies have done for decades. But instead of wholesale first, we modernized the model to reflect how consumers discover and shop today, which is digital-first. 

By eliminating administrative and operational responsibilities for our brands, we stimulate creativity, innovation, and a maniacal commitment to the product and customer experience.  This in turn drives emotional customer connections and brand longevity

• We hope to build a portfolio of 5 to 10 lifestyle brands each with the potential to generate $50 to $100mm in annual revenue
• We own two brands currently and we are aiming for a possible acquisition in 2019
• Our goal is to grow revenues to $250mm+ in 5 years or more
• Actively seeking liquidity options once this Reg A offering closes, including the AIM or OTC
• Liquidity would mean investors would be able to buy and sell their shares 

Dowling recently joined DBG with the strategic intent to leverage her extensive retail track record. She strongly believes in the formidable opportunity at hand within the holding group model given her tenures at similarly structured organization such as Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade Stuart Weitzman) and Swatch Group (Harry Winston, Omega, Breguet). 

During her tenure at Coach, Dowling conceived of and executed their inaugural collaboration with Selena Gomez. The campaign was recognized as one of the global brand’s most effective 360 marketing programs, leading to double digit sales growth, an overnight increase in stock price, and established a significant milestone in their continuous pursuit to reposition themselves amongst millennials. 

“The portfolio model achieves three major wins from a marketing perspective: 1. Internally, my team has greater creativity across multiple categories 2. Externally we are able to communicate at scale given the combination of branding budgets 3. Greater budgets enable my team and our brands to focus on tailored, targeted, and relevant content to continuously engage each customer base in a way that builds brand loyalty and an emotional customer connection.”

In late 2016, we took a price increase in denim to offset higher product costs. We did not experience a decline in customer demand or AOV, which suggests we have pricing power in the future,  if we need it.

In Fall 2018, we focused our marketing on leather jackets and leggings, which are $300 to $400. We saw a significant increase in the leather category, which suggests we have more pricing power and product opportunity than originally thought.  

In Spring 2019, we launched several new categories, all of which have sold well.  This also supports the belief that our customer will support new categories if relevant and well made.

2017 gross margin expansion was driven by a late 2016 price increase.

2018 gross margin expansion was driven by leather revenue, which has a higher gross margin.

We believe that we will experience meaningful gross margin expansion over the next few years. Our current production quantities are close to the minimums, which means  we will experience volume discounts every year as we grow.  This includes both fabric and cut & sew.  

DSTLD and ACE are utilizing the same factories and fabric mills whenever we can, as long as it does not impact the brand or the product.  This should also help drive gross margin expansion.

2018 customer retention rate increased 25% versus 2017,

The retention rate increase was driven by a broader product offering and a focus on repeat customer communications, especially in email.

We plan to increase our retention rate in 2019 by analyzing the data and trends of our repeat customer behavior.  Based on this data, we will create different customer buckets and specific messaging and photos for each of these buckets.     

We also believe that new product category launches and higher product prices will continue to driver a higher AOV.

We acquired new customers at an exponentially higher rate than planned due to targeting new user psychographics plus broader audiences and interest groups.

We significantly expanded our customer reach because we increased our cost to acquire new customers. We knew this would result in acquiring a higher quality customer.  As expected, new customers are both higher quality and spending more.  

Interestingly,  our return on ad spend remained the same. This suggests we have much more acquisition power than we thought.  

Most importantly, we know this accelerated growth is sustainable.

Created a systematic content generation strategy that feeds new content to our targeted audiences, increasing relevance scores, which increased deliverability and has yielded a 200% increase in impressions.

By integrating targeted SMS triggers into our marketing strategy, we’ve been able to see 12x increases (6% to 72%) in click-through-rates & 19x increases in (3% to 58%) conversion rates. 

By shifting from simple one time product notifications, to longer term campaigns, with multiple touchpoints at different moments of the customer journey we’ve successfully increased total volume sales 79%. 

By targeting new and repeat demographic audiences with curated content specifically surrounding higher AOV items, in this case, specifically leather jackets, we provided a lift to the entire leather category revenues by 40%.

While incredible, the increase in engagement to site was achieved by leveraging a channel, Instagram Stories, that is not heavily impacted by the platforms algorithm, and therefore received favorable engagement rates. 

By infusing our paid advertising channels with consistent content specifically created for each individual channel to optimize each individual opportunity 

By researching user behavior utilizing heatmaps and click tracking, we’ve ascertained that users engaged more with editorial content on site, and implemented a strategy that yielded the results above. 

By creating congruent campaigns, matching content from first impression through the entire customer journey, we decreased our bounce rates (users leaving site without interacting).  

We believe that buying and  building a portfolio of five to ten brands that can each generate $50 to $100 million in annual revenues has the potential to quickly scale revenues and profitability. 

Revenue Growth with Low Risk

We believe we can drive incremental revenue through cross marketing our brands to customers and reduce fashion and trend risk by owning brands in different categories. Our goal is to use some of our expense savings to re-invest in the highest performing marketing channels.     

Reducing Expenses & Increasing Margins

Through shared resources in operations, marketing, technology, fulfillment, and customer service, we believe we can significantly reduce redundant operating expenses. We also see the potential to generate meaningful volume discounts, which could lead to gross and operating margin expansion.

Individual Brand Amplification

Authentically enabled at scale by collectively leveraging the budgets and team expertise

Audience-first Mindset

Integrating feedback and data from each brand to inform strategies across all channels

Continuous Engagement

Informed dialogue through each communications partner maintains brand loyalty

DSTLD | Premium Denim + Essentials

ACE Studios | Luxury Suiting and Sportswear

DBG's FIRST PORTFOLIO BRAND

DSTLD’s mission is to design and craft luxury-grade denim and essentials.

• Founded in 2014
• www.dstld.com
• Born and based in downtown Los Angeles
• 19 full-time employees
• +$19mm lifetime sales
• Celebrity fans include Charlize Theron, Mila Kunis, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Sofia Richie, Selena Gomez, Lily Collins, Jennifer Lopez, Alessandra Ambrosio, Ben Affleck, and more

DBG's SECOND PORTFOLIO BRAND

ACE Studios is a luxury suiting and sportswear brand focused on quality, fit, and performance.

• Launched in Q1 2019
• www.acesuits.com
• Leveraged Hil Davis’ tailored clothing experience for supply chain and relationships
  • Cost less than $25k (excluding inventory) to launch 
  • Mills are holding additional fabric without requiring deposits so we can replenish faster
  • Factories gave favorable pricing given Hil’s experience and last success
• Planning a Q4 2019 cross-brand promotion with DSTLD that might offer or include something like the following:
  • Buy an ACE sport coat and receive a free pair of DSTLD denim
  • We plan to target existing DSTLD email list
  • We believe this will result in increased Lifetime Revenue (LTR) of DSTLD customers across both brands