When Dan Demsky and his childhood friends launched Unbound Merino in 2016, they had no ecommerce experience and were running the venture as a Friday night side hustle. Nine years later, the merino wool apparel brand is approaching $100 million in cumulative lifetime revenue, with $60 million projected for this year alone.
The journey started with a $30,000 Indiegogo campaign and grew into an eight-figure business without bringing in venture capital.
The strategies that powered $100M in lifetime revenue
1. Sell benefits, not features—even in a crowded market
The apparel industry is notoriously saturated. Dan knew from day one that competing on product alone wouldn’t work. “There’s a million places to buy a t-shirt, but ours helps you pack light,” he says. “It was a message that we thought was powerful enough to stand above the rest.”
Understanding their unique value proposition meant Unbound Merino knew exactly how they’d message. Rather than positioning Unbound Merino as another fashion brand in a crowded market, they focused on how they could offer freedom through minimalism. Their early slogan—“Pack less, experience more”—spoke directly to travelers frustrated with overpacking. The Unbound Merino team knew they could differentiate their offering by identifying the transformation their brand enables, not just what their product does. Customers weren’t buying a t-shirt—they were buying the ability to travel lighter and more spontaneously.
2. Break even on first purchase, win on lifetime value
The customer acquisition strategy Unbound Merino used centers on a counterintuitive principle: they’re willing to break even on the first sale. With a target ROAS (return on ad spend) goal to make three to four times as much money in sales as the amount spent on advertising through Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Dan knew the company’s profits would come later.
The brand’s data backs this up: 30% of customers make a repeat purchase within the first month. Unbound Merino now spends more than $20,000 daily on Meta ads alone, scaling the budget by 1.5% every single week, without letting ROAS drop below three times.
When planning your Meta ads strategy, calculate your true customer lifetime value first, then work backward to determine acquisition spend. “It really just comes down to the quality of the product. That is the thing that gets people to come back,” Dan says. “If we were making a bad product, no one’s coming back. Everything else is fluff.”
This Meta ads strategy works best if you have a product capable of inspiring loyalty. You can outspend competitors who optimize for immediate profitability, but only if your product quality justifies repeat purchases.
3. Keep kicking doors until one opens
Dan believes Unbound Merino continues to see growth with its ads strategy because it constantly experiments across channels. Even if certain channels are successful this week, the team isn’t married to any single strategy. “You’re walking down like a hallway with a million doors," Dan says. “You kind of gotta just nudge the door open with your foot and see if something is in there. You have to never stop trying [marketing channels].”
Meta remains the brand’s largest channel, yet it continuously tests Google Ads (working well), influencer and affiliate marketing (solid success), TikTok (admittedly terrible—“We laugh every quarter. We’re like, all right, what’s our TikTok strategy? ’Cause we just keep throwing money at it.”), and Pinterest (exploring).
Most of Unbound Merino’s budget for ads is used on designs and messages that have already shown to work well, while a small portion is used to try new creative ideas and see if they could also be successful. “The stuff that you get most attached to creatively, that stuff doesn’t work. The stuff that you think is sort of, like, really pitchy and, like, kind of cheesy, that works,” Dan shares.
4. Go to the source—literally
When Unbound Merino placed its first manufacturing order in China, the founders did something unusual: they flew to the factory. “We told them, when production happens, we’re gonna be on the production floor,” Dan says. “We showed up. I’m, like, measuring it with a measuring tape. I put it on, and I wore it for a week in Shanghai. They’re probably looking at us, like, ‘These guys have no idea what they’re doing.’"
But this paranoia-driven decision created an unexpected advantage. “We got to become friends with them. We got invited to their family weddings,” Dan says. That relationship became a safeguard for quality control and has lasted nearly a decade—Unbound Merino still works with that original supplier.
5. Listen when customers tell you what they want
Unbound Merino launched as a men’s brand, and two years ago, it finally introduced women’s apparel. Today its women’s line accounts for more than 50% of revenue and has already surpassed its men’s business.
The opportunity was obvious in hindsight. “We had so many women customers before we had women’s clothing ’cause they were buying the stuff for their husbands, boyfriends, sons,” Dan says. “We kept getting emails saying, ‘Where’s women’s clothing?’ Clearly there’s a demand here.”
Why did they wait? Dan is honest about the knowledge gap: “I’m not arrogant enough to think, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know what this is supposed to be.’" To respond to the opportunity, Unbound Merino knew it needed to hire experienced women designers who understood both the brand aesthetic and female customer needs. Once it could afford that team, the women’s line took off immediately.
6. Build with your friends (yes, really)
Building a business with childhood friends goes against all the conventional wisdom that says mixing friendship and business is disastrous. Dan couldn’t disagree more.
“You spend more of your waking hours working than you do anything else. Why would it be a bad idea to want to be with your best friends?” he argues. You often share core values with friends—the foundation that most businesses spend years trying to establish through hiring. The partnership works because of complementary skills, shared vision, and genuine enjoyment of working together.
What’s striking about Unbound’s story isn’t just the revenue growth—it’s the sustainability. Dan still runs the business with his friends. They’re profitable. They’re having fun. And they’re not interested in selling.
For entrepreneurs overwhelmed by pressure to scale fast, raise big, and exit bigger, Unbound Merino offers an alternative path: build a product people genuinely love, invest in sustainable acquisition, surround yourself with people you trust, and enjoy the journey.
Tune in to the full Shopify Masters episode to hear what’s next for Unbound Merino, and why the $100 million milestone isn’t the end goal—simply proof the brand’ approach works.
