Appendix · The research behind the plan

The research behind the plan, numbered as it is cited. Each number in the text links here, and ↩ returns to it.

Summary

1
Craft beer: Brewers Association, 2025 annual report: craft retail value $28.0 billion; craft 13.4% of US beer volume and 24.8% of retail dollars. Brewers Association. ↩
2
Craft spirits: American Craft Spirits Association, 2025 Craft Spirits Data Project: $7.58 billion in 2024 sales; 4.5% of US spirits volume, 7.5% of value. American Craft Spirits Association. ↩
3
Tequila: DISCUS via Choices Magazine: US tequila and mezcal supplier revenue $6.4 billion in 2025; about 48% from super-premium products above $250 a case, so about $3 billion. Choices Magazine. ↩
4
Handmade effect: Fuchs, Schreier and van Osselaer, “The Handmade Effect: What’s Love Got to Do with It?”, Journal of Marketing, 2015. Handmade products are perceived to contain love; the effect is strongest for gifts to loved ones and when buying to convey love rather than to get the best-performing product; participants paid 17% more for a bar of soap labeled handmade. The paper. ↩
5
Sierra Nevada: founded with about $50,000 in loans from friends and family; the brewhouse was built from discarded dairy equipment and scrap metal. Wikipedia. ↩
6
Field Company: Kickstarter, 2016, $1,633,362 raised against a $30,000 goal, from more than 12,000 backers. BackerKit. ↩
7
Tecovas: 2017 round of $2.6 million led by YETI Capital, to expand its team, marketing and product line. FinSMEs. ↩

1 · Why

8
Social identity theory, Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979): people define part of who they are through the groups they belong to. ↩
9
Rapha was bought in 2017 for £200 million; turnover was £96 million in the year to January 2025, down from £110 million. Source: Cycling Weekly. ↩
10
Malbon was reported in 2025 as nearing $100 million in revenue, eight years after its founding. Source: Shop Eat Surf Outdoor, interview with CEO Aaron Heiser. ↩
11
Good Good recorded more than $40 million in revenue in 2025 by Forbes estimates, with apparel and products about 75% of earnings; it raised $45 million in March 2025. Sources: Forbes and Golf.com. ↩
12
Bogey Bros (Spring, Texas; not Bogey Boys) turned $6,000 of seed money into $15.5 million in 2024 sales and expected $22 million in 2025. Source: Inc. ↩
13
Eastside Golf grew from $100,000 in its first year to $4 million in 2023; its $3.4 million seed round was led by EP Golf Ventures, a partnership of the PGA of America and Elysian Park Ventures. Source: Shoppe Black. ↩
14
Tracksmith is private; third-party estimates put its online revenue at about $25 million in 2025. Source: ECDB. ↩
15
Satisfy closed an €11 million Series B and was on track to double revenue to €11 to €12 million, targeting €100 million within five years. Source: FashionNetwork. ↩
16
Bandit raised $16 million in 2025, bringing total capital raised to more than $30 million. Source: Brand Futures. ↩
17
Adidas reported €24.81 billion in 2025 revenue; its performance business grew 39% in the first half of 2026, led by football and running. Sources: World Footwear and adidas. ↩
18
Soccer: 8.2% of Americans, about 25.5 million, played indoor or outdoor soccer as of June 2026 (SFIA). Golf: on-course participation reached 29.1 million in 2025 (National Golf Foundation). ↩
19
SFIA, Soccer Spotlight report, May 2026: outdoor soccer participation reached 16.8 million in 2025, up 15.8% year over year; ages 35 to 44 grew 118% and 45 to 54 grew 247% from 2018 to 2025; 15.2 million non-players said in 2025 they intend to play in the next 12 months. Sources: SFIA, “Soccer participation in the U.S. hits an all-time high” and SFIA, “The World Cup is here and America is already playing”. ↩

2 · What we make

20
The handmade effect. ↩

Fuchs, Schreier and Van Osselaer, Journal of Marketing, 2015.
21
The effort heuristic. ↩

Kruger and others, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2004.
22
Authenticity from place and history. ↩

Beverland, Journal of Management Studies, 2005.
23
Handmade premium: Church and Oakley (2018), cited in “The Handmade Effect: A Model of Conscious Shopping in an Industrialised Economy,” Review of Industrial Organization: handmade products on Etsy sold for an average of 78% more than manufactured counterparts, controlling for shop size, reputation and social media. Springer. ↩
24
Nokona: SABR, “Nokona Baseball Gloves: America’s Pastime, American Made”: Nokona gloves retail around $300 to $400, while Rawlings and Wilson models start near $150; two thirds of a Nokona’s cost is labor. SABR. ↩
25
Owner review: Cam, review of the Standard Model No. 152, hayworthathletic.com/product-152. ↩
26
Gear Patrol: “Today in Gear,” May 14, 2026. Gear Patrol. ↩

3 · Who

27
Participation. ↩

Participation, SFIA. Soccer: about 25.5 million Americans played indoor or outdoor soccer as of June 2026. Outdoor soccer alone reached a record 16.8 million in 2025, and rose a further 6.2 percent in the first half of 2026, during the opening weeks of the World Cup. Baseball: about 16.7 million in 2023, a record at the time; SFIA’s 2026 Topline names baseball and outdoor soccer, with basketball, as the leaders of team sports’ first year above 90 million participants. Basketball remains the most played team sport. Pickleball, not a team sport, has about 24.3 million players.

Sources: https://sfia.org/u-s-soccer-participation-data/; https://sfia.org/resource_categories/press-release/

How the SAM is sized. ↩

Two ways, and they bracket each other. The plan uses Meta’s, because it counts the three circles at once instead of estimating them.

Step	People	Basis
Counted by Meta: audience estimates for United States adults, read from Ads Manager on 25 September 2026
Interested in soccer		Meta’s count of US adults who follow the game. Wider than the people who play.
Of them, also Etsy users: the craft buyer		The nearest thing Meta has to “has bought a made thing.”
Of them, also parents: the gift giver		The overlap of all three circles.
Built up from public figures, as a check
Core players, 26 or more times a year		SFIA: of participants. A casual player does not get a ball.
Gift-giving adults in those households		About 1.3 core players per household, two giving adults each. Assumption.
Of them, craft and premium buyers		. Youth sports skew affluent. Assumption.
Of them, giving a soccer gift this year		. NRF finds one in five of all consumers wants sporting goods as a gift; inside a soccer household it is more. Assumption.

Sources: SFIA, 2025; Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2024; NRF, 2025; Etsy buyers. Meta’s estimates cover its own platforms and are ranges by design.

Which we choose, and how we reach them again. ↩

We do not choose people. We choose filters, in the order of how well each predicts a sale, and apply them until the crowd is the size the budget can cover. The same filters choose the creators we seed, the larger voices we pay and the outlets we pitch. Income is not among them: Meta removed household-income targeting in the United States in 2022, and spending predicts this sale better than income does.

	Filter	How
1	Already spends this way	Affinity for YETI, Patagonia, Filson, Made In; Meta’s engaged-shoppers behavior. Creators whose sponsors are premium brands.
2	Lives where club soccer is dense and money is	A dozen metros and their ZIP codes: Dallas, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Northern Virginia, New Jersey, Chicago’s north suburbs, Denver, Seattle, Orange County, the Bay Area. The creators we seed and the outlets we pitch are chosen from the same map.
3	A player of the right age in the house	Parents of children 6 to 17, not all parents. Youth-club creators before adult-league ones.
4	Already warm	Engagers, visitors, buyers, and a lookalike built from buyers. The reminders go only to them.

Reaching the same people again

How precisely it can be aimed	Impressions	Share	How
At a crowd we define exactly			The ads: one Meta saved audience built from the four filters, bought as reach and frequency, and the reminders, which go only to people who have already looked or engaged.
At audiences we choose but do not control			We pick which creators get a ball and which larger voices we pay. Their followers overlap heavily inside one niche, and Meta’s overlap tools show how closely each matches the saved audience.
Not aimed			Press. Whoever reads the article reads it.

Dividing the impressions by nine assumes each one lands inside the crowd and lands evenly. Neither is exactly true: some people will see the ball twenty times and some twice, and the press and part of the creator reach fall outside. The figure is what accurate aim would buy, the filters are how we get close, and Meta reports the frequency it actually delivered every week on the majority of impressions.

In waves, not spread across the year

Nine impressions to people over twelve months is one impression every days each. Nobody remembers a ball they saw six weeks ago. A considered purchase at this price takes thirty to ninety days of active looking, so the nine have to land inside that window, not across a year.

So the crowd is worked in waves of about people, each wave getting its nine impressions inside a quarter: one every days. Same budget, same total impressions, same crowd by year end. The first wave is the metros where the ball already sells, and each wave after it adds the next metros and the creators whose earlier posts sold. A metro that has not sold by its second wave is dropped and its budget moves to one that has.

One consequence to state plainly: the last wave lands in the autumn and part of what it sells falls into year two. The year-one figure carries that.

What proves it: Meta’s delivered frequency week by week, the question asked at checkout, and sales by metro against spend by metro.

30
Four kinds of buyer, and the lane that reaches each. ↩

The player. 16 and up, wanting a ball of their own, replacing one every year or two until they find one worth keeping. Reached by the seeded creators and the larger voices, and by the ads that carry their posts.

The gifter. 35 to 55, buying for someone who loves the game. Reached by the release weeks and the gift guides.

The tastemaker. Buys objects for how they are made, and may never have played. Reached by the Makers releases and the outlets that cover made things.

The coach or former player. Knows the game and wants a ball worth the hours they gave it. Reached by the creators they already follow, and by the Letters.

5 · How

31
Why we believe each rate. ↩

Come and look. Of the people who see a seeded creator’s post, we assume come to the site; of a larger voice’s film, ; of an ad carrying a creator post, . We have measured this on ourselves: over the 106 days to 25 September 2026, Hayworth served impressions on Instagram, and Instagram sent of the site’s visits, which is per impression. That is from people who already follow us, so strangers will click less. For scale, a paid ad earns a click from of the people who see it. All three of our rates sit below both figures.

Buy on the first visit, . Price is the strongest predictor of whether a store converts, stronger than its category. A store charging converts about of its visitors, one charging about , and across our mix, a ball, . Against that, visitors who arrive on someone’s recommendation buy at where a cold ad earns , and ours arrive from creators. We take .

Buy after a reminder. Of the people who looked and left, buy over the fourteen days of reminders; of the people who only engaged, . This is the least grounded rate in the plan: it is an assumption, and Meta reports the real figure every week from the first month.

Referred or returning. For every balls sold, one more goes to someone a buyer told or to a buyer coming back. of the customers from the last six months have already bought twice, measured over six months with no email program running, and referral programs across e-commerce generate ten to thirty percent of revenue.

Sources: Meta ad benchmarks by industry, 2026, as reported by Triple Whale; conversion by traffic source from Ruler Analytics, 2026; conversion by average order value from DTC Pages, 2026, a study of 21 Shopify stores and $688 million of revenue; Hayworth’s own orders and repeat rate from Shopify; its Instagram impressions from Metricool and its site visits from the site’s own analytics. Every rate, in all three cases, is listed in note 33.
32
Launch-stage direct brands under $1 million of revenue typically spend 25 to 35 percent of revenue on marketing, the most aggressive 40 to 60 percent while building a customer base; inverted, that is $1.67 to $4.00 of revenue per marketing dollar (EightX ad-spend-by-stage benchmarks; MHI Media analysis of 200+ DTC campaigns, 2026). Tecovas reached $1 million of revenue in its first year (2015 to 2016) selling handmade western boots direct, and $100 million by year six. Good Good’s content-first model is described by RockWater as content serving as the marketing and user acquisition engine, minimizing the need for paid spend. Sources: https://eightx.co/blog/ad-spend-percent-revenue-by-stage-2026 and https://mhigrowthengine.com/blog/dtc-marketing-budget-allocation-guide-2026/ and https://grokipedia.com/page/Tecovas_(company) and https://wearerockwater.com/good-good-golf-investment/ ↩ ↩
33
Every rate in the funnel, in all three cases. ↩

Rate Downside Base Upside

The cost of an ad to new people is the median Meta figure for e-commerce, a thousand (Triple Whale, 2026). The purchase rate is read from price, as in note 31. The creator and larger-voice figures are working assumptions from published 2026 rate cards, to be replaced by quotes and then by what the first quarter measures. The reminder rates are the least grounded, and the first to be measured.

The split is the one brands selling above $100 start from: a fifth to seed content, three tenths to a few larger voices, a little over a third to ads, a tenth to films, a twentieth to press. It is a starting point, and the first quarter’s numbers move it. A buyer is counted to the line that first reached them, even when a reminder closed the sale.
34
Seeding feeds the ads. ↩

Seeding feeds the ads. About balls go to soccer creators, most of them with 1,000 to 50,000 followers, and to the people each release is built around. Each ball ships with an agreement: a post, and the right to run that post as an ad from the creator’s own account. The posts that sell on their own become the ads to new people, and the small creators behind them are paid to post again. A seeded ball buys a post and a year of advertising in one.
35
The research behind the creator lane. ↩

How many times a buyer has to see it. There is no single number. Nielsen’s Digital Brand Effect study in 2017 found 5 to 9 exposures lifted brand resonance 51 percent on average. Brand Metrics, across its database of display campaigns, finds purchase intent moves most at 7, and that six sightings beat nine once cost is counted. Magna and Roku in 2023 found no single number: shoppers already in the category move after about four. The studies are about advertising, not creator posts; the transfer is an inference. The working figure for a new brand asking $135 is five to nine, from more than one voice.

How the brands that built this way did it. Ridge ran 3,000 creator videos from 750 creators in 2020 for $3.9 million, about $1,300 a video, ten a day, most of them short reads inside videos about other subjects. Gymshark shipped its clothes to small fitness YouTubers before it had an advertising budget, most of them unpaid. Glossier was built on the readers of its founder’s beauty blog and the everyday enthusiasts who posted about the products; the Harvard Business School case on it, by Jill Avery, records sales up 600 percent in 2017 and a customer base that tripled, and frames paid influencers as the step the company weighed after that. The 2026 DTC playbook, repeated across the seeding sources: seed widely, pay the ones who post, keep the few whose audiences buy. A typical program seeds about 200 creators a quarter and sees a 40 to 50 percent post rate.

What creator content costs in 2026. For the tier this plan can buy, 1,000 to 100,000 followers: an Instagram post or Reel $150 to $500, a TikTok $200 to $800, a YouTube integration $200 to $1,500, a YouTube dedicated video $1,000 to $5,000. The one transaction dataset, Collabstr’s 21,000 collaborations, shows brands actually pay about $193 for an Instagram post, $288 for a Reel and $217 for a TikTok. Sports is a low-cost niche on YouTube, $12 to $25 per thousand views against $15 to $80 across all niches. Usage rights add 20 to 50 percent. Gifting costs $25 to $170 per creator, 30 to 50 percent of gifted creators post, so a gifted post costs about $160. Seeding was 31 percent of all campaigns on the Aspire platform in 2025, up from 20 percent.

Returns. Influencer Marketing Hub’s annual survey of marketers reports $5.20 to $5.78 back per $1 spent on creators; GRIN and Aspire claim three to eight times on seeding programs. All of it is self-reported by people who sell creator services, so the plan treats it as a ceiling, not a forecast.

Sources. Influencer Marketing Hub, “Micro Influencer Rates For 2026”; Collabstr, “2026 Influencer Marketing Report”; OutlierKit, “YouTube Sponsorship Rates 2026”; SponsorRadar, “YouTube Sponsorship Rates 2026”; Seeding Ops, “What Is Product Seeding?”; GRIN, “Product Seeding in 2026”; Pigeon Digital, “Creator Volume Is What’s Scaling DTC Now”; Markeview, “Advertising Frequency”; Nielsen Digital Brand Effect, reported by B&T, 2017; Brand Metrics, “What is an optimal frequency level?”; Magna and Roku, frequency study, 2023; Harvard Business School, Jill Avery, “Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community,” case 519-022, January 2019; Influencity, “Product Seeding in Influencer Marketing” (Gymshark); Practical Ecommerce on Ridge, in the seven-brand study below.
36
The larger voices. ↩

The larger voices land in the week of a release. Two or three coaches, trainers or reviewers with 100,000 to 500,000 followers who all play, paid for a film. Each is timed to a release: the Ellis in November, the Makers releases in February and August. The film, the press and their post land in the same week, so a buyer meets the ball from three directions at once. Not a famous player: the wrong economics, and the wrong register for a quiet brand.
37
The research behind it: seven brands, with sources. ↩

Ridge makes a metal wallet. In 2021 its chief operating officer, Sean Frank, said “Prices range from $75 for an aluminum wallet to $175, which is our Damascus design.” The company launched on Kickstarter in 2014 and reached $50 million in sales in 2020. The story was told first by YouTube creators, paid to place a short read for the wallet inside videos about other subjects. Frank in 2021: “We sponsor a lot of influencers on YouTube. Roughly 750 in 2020, when we spent $3.9 million on 3,000 unique videos. That’s 10 new videos a day that we’re integrated with.” He has also said the best channels are not about wallets: “One of our best performing channels is a guy who owns a farm, and he’s a veterinarian for horses, and he just posts content, and he just happens to have a Ridge Wallet in every one of his videos.” Ridge ran paid Facebook advertising alongside the creator program; in 2021 Frank noted “Our CPMs on Facebook were up 100 percent year-over-year for most of 2020,” and in 2022 Practical Ecommerce described influencer marketing as “Ridge Wallet’s principal revenue generator” and wrote that “Hyper-targeted Facebook ads produced strong results.” In January 2025 Frank wrote that holdout tests suggested “50-70% of meta spend seems wasted” and “We have cut meta from 70% of budgets in 2023 to 30% of budget in 2025.” Ridge’s creators were paid from the start; its story is paid creators before paid reach, not earned word of mouth.

YETI makes coolers and drinkware. Its first coolers went on sale in 2006 at $250 to $300, which Inc. called “an astounding premium” over the average cooler. The story was told first by fishermen and hunting guides, and by the founders themselves from a van. A 2017 interview with the National Center for the Middle Market says “the Seiderses spent countless weekends traveling across Texas with nothing but a van full of coolers to sell.” Inc. reported in 2016 that sales reached $29 million in 2011 “as word spread among the hardcore ‘hook and bullet’ crowd,” and that the 2015 surge “was the payoff from years of grassroots marketing to fishermen and hunters who not only spread the word but helped Yeti spill into other markets.” Roy Seiders on the customers: “People in Texas will brag that their cooler is grizzly-proof, even though there’s not a grizzly within 1,000 miles.” REI ran a test program in 2014 and expanded after it “went through the roof,” in the words of an REI merchandising manager. Inc. also reports that the company grew “with the help of an outside investor” into “a more sophisticated sales and marketing organization” after the word of mouth years; the date and size of YETI’s first paid advertising are not in the sources cited here.

Made In makes cookware. Its 10-inch stainless clad frying pan lists at $139 on the company’s site. The company launched in 2017. The story was told first by chefs. Six months after launch the founders sent a pitch deck to Tom Colicchio, who became an investor after a half-hour meeting, according to the Berkeley Haas magazine. Chief executive Chip Malt told Modern Retail in October 2021: “Chefs are the new athlete.” The article reports that restaurants “make up only 5% of its total sales,” but Malt said the chef community “makes up way larger than 5% of our mindshare” and that, by focusing on those tastemakers, “it’s an organic growth through that community.” He said sales grew five times in 2020. Made In’s paid advertising, and when it began, is not described in the sources cited here.

Solo Stove makes fire pits. The Bonfire with its stand lists at $299.99 on the company’s site. Brothers Jeff and Spencer Jan started with a small camp stove in 2011 and put the Bonfire fire pit on Kickstarter in 2016, where the campaign “hit its $15,000 goal in just two hours” and raised “more than $1.1 million,” per CNBC. The story was told first by backers and then by customers; a Solo Stove marketer told Attentive in 2026, “Our customers do a great job of speaking to the brand for us, and we want to give them platforms to do that.” Chief executive John Merris, hired in 2018, told an interviewer in 2021 that “We make very calculated decisions around our digital investments, and it’s all tied back to a return on ad spend. We don’t do anything blindly and we typically say no to any opportunity that can’t be measured.” The interviewer’s own remark in that piece was that “Solo Stove is all over Instagram.” This is the brand that does not fit the pattern below: measured paid advertising was central to its growth from early on.

Peak Design makes camera clips and bags. Its first object, the Capture clip, was offered on Kickstarter in 2011 at $50 for the preorder run and $100 for the first batch, so it sits below the $100 line; the bags that followed are above it. The story was told first by Kickstarter backers. Founder Peter Dering: “All I had was an idea that I thought was the bee’s knees.” The campaign “aimed to raise $10,000 in 75 days” and “surpassed that total in just two days, ultimately raising $364,698 from 5,258 backers,” per Retail Brew. Dering, on the REI Co-op Journal: “It was the first time I experienced the power of the internet. These strangers I’ve never met before were backing this gizmo.” The company has since launched eleven products on Kickstarter, raising about $36 million, and its founder calls the platform the firm’s “initial sales channel” and “community building platform.” Peak Design’s paid advertising is not described in the sources cited here.

Rumpl makes blankets. The original puffy blanket retails at $99, so it sits at the line rather than above it; the figure is from Shark Tank coverage. The story was told first by Kickstarter backers. Founder Wylie Robinson on the How I Hire podcast: “we decided to do a Kickstarter in December of 2013. And the Kickstarter campaign did really, really well and ended up doing about a quarter million dollars in sales in 30 days, which was wild to us. And that was like the clear sign that, okay, this is a viable idea.” On the first year: “Our first year in business, we did about a half million dollars of revenue.” In a 2024 interview he said: “we launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised $250,000 in 30 days, selling 2,000 units.” By the time of his 2020 Shark Tank appearance the blankets were sold at every REI, per Looper. Rumpl’s paid advertising, and when it began, is not described in the sources cited here.

Selkirk Sport makes pickleball paddles. Its Vanguard paddles list at $250 to $298 on the company’s site. Founded in 2014 by brothers Rob and Mike Barnes and their father, the company, in Business Insider’s words, spent years “breaking even” before the sport’s growth carried it; Forbes reports it is profitable, expects at least $100 million in revenue in 2026, and took its first outside investment, $30 million from Bluestone Equity Partners at a valuation of about $200 million, in January 2026. The story was told first by players and instructors. Mike Barnes, in the investment announcement: “we’ve built a cutting-edge retail and direct-to-consumer distribution channel, supported by investments in content platforms like Selkirk Pickleball TV, a brand ambassador program with more than 1,300 advocates across the U.S. and sponsorships of elite and emerging pickleball pros.” Rob Barnes: “We got into pickleball before it was cool. If you’re waiting to jump into the latest trend, you’re probably too late.” Selkirk’s paid advertising is not described in the sources cited here.

The pattern. Six of the seven brands found their first buyers through a person or a community the buyer already trusted, before the brand bought reach: YouTube creators for Ridge, guides and specialty retailers for YETI, chefs for Made In, backers for Peak Design and Rumpl, players and instructors for Selkirk. In each of those six the object was in a credible hand before a stranger was asked to pay for it, and where paid advertising appears in the record it comes after that. Solo Stove is the exception: it began on Kickstarter like Peak Design and Rumpl, but by its chief executive’s own account measured paid advertising was central to its growth early. Two cautions on the pattern itself. Ridge’s creators were paid from the start, so its story is paid creators before paid reach, not earned word of mouth. And for four of the seven brands the sources say nothing about paid advertising at all, so its absence from their early years is an inference from silence, not a documented fact.

Sources. Ridge: Practical Ecommerce, Eric Bandholz, “Ridge Wallet Hits $50 Million with Influencer Marketing,” February 12, 2021; Practical Ecommerce, Eric Bandholz, “Ridge Wallet CEO on Influencer Turmoil, iOS 14.5,” July 15, 2022; Mission (Medium), “Building a Durable Business That Can Survive Long-Term,” Sean Frank interview, 2022; Sean Frank on X, January 2025. YETI: Inc., Bill Saporito, “How 2 Brothers Turned a $300 Cooler Into a $450 Million Cult Brand,” January 27, 2016; National Center for the Middle Market, “Yeti,” 2017. Made In: Modern Retail, Cale Guthrie Weissman, “‘Chefs are the new athlete’: Made In’s Chip Malt on how the cookware brand taps culinary influencers,” October 21, 2021; Berkeley Haas magazine, Nancy Davis Kho, “Trial by Fire,” Fall 2021. Solo Stove: CNBC Make It, “How two Texan brothers ‘reinvented fire’ to build a $400 million backyard campfire company with a cult following,” February 14, 2023; Eunoia by Carolyn Hadlock (Medium), John Merris interview, 2021; Attentive, “How Solo Stove Made Starting a Fire Accessible to All,” 2026. Peak Design: Retail Brew, Andrew Adam Newman, “Why this DTC brand keeps using Kickstarter to launch products long after it needs crowdfunding,” August 29, 2023; REI Co-op Journal, “Peak Design: A Crowdfunded Company,” 2019. Rumpl: How I Hire podcast, “Wylie Robinson on the Evolution of Rumpl’s Talent Strategy,” transcript, 2022; White Summers, “Founder Focus: Wylie Robinson, Rumpl,” 2024; Looper, “What Happened To Rumpl After Its Failed Shark Tank Attempt?,” 2023; Shark Tank Talks, “Rumpl Blanket Shark Tank Update,” 2024. Prices: Made In, 10” Stainless Steel Frying Pan; Solo Stove, Bonfire Fire Pit & Stand Bundle; Selkirk, VANGUARD paddles; all read September 24, 2026. Selkirk: Business Wire, “Bluestone Equity Partners Makes Strategic Investment in Selkirk Sport,” January 20, 2026; Forbes, Tim Casey, “Bluestone Invests $30 Million In Selkirk Sport As Pickleball Company Expands Ambitions,” January 20, 2026; Business Insider via Yahoo Finance, “Two brothers skipped college to start a pickleball company before the game was cool,” 2026.

The fourteen-day reminder. ↩

The reminder answers a question, not “buy now.” At this price the decision takes one to three weeks. People look for reviews, wait for payday, ask a partner. So the reminders run for fourteen days after a visit and each stage answers the objection that stage raises. No countdowns and no discounts; it stops at fourteen days or at a purchase.

Days after the visit	What they see	The question it answers
1 to 3	The release film, or the larger voice’s film that brought them.	Is it beautiful enough to want?
4 to 7	The stitching up close: the needle, the waxed thread, the panels cut on the die. The ball on a pitch and on a shelf.	Why does it cost what it costs?
8 to 14	Soccer.com’s Best Soccer Balls of 2026, 4.98 from 57 owners, the press, and paying in installments at checkout.	Is it worth it, and can I buy it now?

The content, and what it has to do at each of the nine times. ↩

The nine impressions are not nine of the same thing. A person moves through a sequence, and each stage has a job. The budget delivers the reach; the content below decides what it carries.

Times seen	Where they are	What has to reach them
1 to 2	The hook. The ball is beautiful and the price is a shock.	The ball itself, shot well. A creator holding it. Slow motion on a real pitch. Nothing explained yet.
3 to 4	The education. They want to know why it costs what it costs.	The hands. A needle pulling waxed thread through a panel, close and unhurried. The panels cut on the die. The kiln. Why a hand-stitched ball holds its shape when a glued one goes soft.
5 to 6	The proof. They believe the object; they want someone else to say it.	A coach on camera. A review from someone who plays. The ball on a shelf in a room someone made, not a studio. The Letters, which are the longest thing we make and the only place the whole argument fits.
7 to 9	The decision. They are deciding whether it is worth it, and for a Makers release whether to be one of the hundred.	The box it arrives in. The stand. The card. A reminder ad carrying the post that already sold, and an email at a moment when someone is buying a gift.

The formats, in the order they earn their keep

The stitching films. A needle through a panel, in close. Fifteen to sixty seconds, made in Monguí where the work already happens, cut from footage we already own. This is the one format that holds a stranger for longer than a second, and the one that turns the price from a problem into the reason.

The unboxing. The box, the card, the ball. Premium packaging is the argument for a premium price, made without a word.

Played and displayed. The same ball on a pitch in slow motion and on a shelf in a room. It is the whole positioning in two shots: it is equipment and it is not.

The Letters. Long-form, on our own site, where the full case for the craft fits and nothing else can carry it.

The stand and the room. Where the ball lives when it is not being kicked. This is the shot that moves the gifter.

What it has to reach, and where it stands today

Reach is what the budget buys. Depth is what the content earns, and it is the gap. Over the 106 days to 25 September 2026 the films were watched 62 times on YouTube and the Letters were read 147 times, against one-second impressions on Instagram. The targets for year one are the honest version of that: the Letters read a thousand times a month, the films watched ten thousand times. Both are counted today, both are near zero, and neither is in the sales forecast.

How much time that actually is. A buyer who watches five stitching films, one launch film, visits the site three times and reads one Letter has given us about twenty minutes. That is the realistic ceiling for an object at this price, and it is the number worth chasing. Claims of seven hours belong to purchases that cost thousands; nobody spends a working day deciding on a soccer ball. Twenty minutes, spread across a quarter, from more than one voice, is what changes the answer from why is it expensive to I want one.

A note on the material. The No. 152 is hand-stitched PU, not leather: waterproof, and it holds its shape. The films should say so. The craft is in the stitching and the panels, and claiming leather would be both wrong and unnecessary.

40
Why the following matters, and what the research says. ↩

In year one that sells little directly, about balls, because the account starts small. It matters in three other ways. The people who engage with our own posts join the reminder audience, which is where the reminder money otherwise runs out of people. A buyer deciding whether a $168 ball is worth it looks at the account before buying, and a following is the proof they find. And year two opens with an audience that sees about impressions a year for free, before a dollar is spent. Growing it is the operator’s job: posting the films, the stitching, the Letters and the owners’ photographs every week, answering every comment, and asking every buyer to follow.

What the research says. An account’s posts reach a fraction of its followers: about 8 to 15 percent for accounts under 10,000, and falling about 14 percent a year (Socialinsider; MeetEdgar, 2026). Reels reach people who do not follow the account at about twice the rate of other posts, so they are how an account grows. Small accounts grow faster than large ones, and the average grows 1.25 to 2.5 percent a month (eMarketer; Sprout Social). People who have engaged with a brand more than once buy at two to five times the rate of people who have not, which is why Meta lets an advertiser remind the people who engaged on Instagram and not only those who visited the site (Adamigo, 2026). No study publishes the share of engagers who follow; that rate is ours to measure from the first month. These sources are industry blogs, not studies; the plan uses them for direction, not for the figures it depends on.

Every dollar above rents attention. The following is the one thing it buys that we keep. Of the people the budget gets to stop and engage, we assume follow Hayworth, and the account grows a month from its own posts. Each follower sees about of our posts a month, which we have measured, and costs nothing to reach again. In the base case the account goes from to about followers.

The model · What has to be true

41
Purchases per visit from social media traffic average 0.91 percent across online stores (OptiMonk, 2026 conversion statistics). Traffic from paid social converts at 0.5 to 1.5 percent (Build Grow Scale, benchmarks across 2,654 stores). First-time visitors sitewide convert at 1.0 to 2.0 percent. Sources: https://www.optimonk.com/ecommerce-conversion-rate-optimization-statistics and https://buildgrowscale.com/ecommerce-conversion-rate-benchmarks ↩
42
About 97 percent of visitors leave an online store without buying on the first visit, and 26 percent of customers who buy return to the site through a reminder ad to complete the purchase (Invesp, compiled retargeting research). Reminder campaigns convert at a median of about 3.8 percent, against 1.5 to 2.2 percent for ads to strangers (WordStream 2026 benchmark data). The plan’s rate counts every past visitor, not only those who click a reminder. Sources: https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/retargeting-statistics/ and https://www.webtonic.io/blog/retargeting ↩
43
The median cost to show an ad 1,000 times on Meta for e-commerce brands was $14.19 to $15.06 in 2026, up about 20 percent from the year before (Triple Whale, ecommerce-weighted data, August 2026). The plan carries $15 in year one, $18 in year two and $21 in year three to reflect the trend. Sources: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2026-cpc-cpm-ctr-industry and https://hawky.ai/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks ↩
44
Creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers post about a gifted product at 40 to 70 percent when the product fits their audience; mid-tier creators post at 20 to 35 percent, and the benchmark for a well-qualified list overall is 30 to 42 percent (Aspire and CreatorIQ data, compiled 2026). Sources: https://www.elev8or.io/blog/influencer-gifting-and-product-seeding-guide and https://www.influencergiftform.com/blog/pr-unboxing ↩
45
Across 156,110 online customers, 18.8 percent placed a second order within a year; durable goods ran 7 to 18 percent (BS & Co, repeat purchase benchmarks). The broader 12-month average across online retail is 25 to 30 percent, lifted by consumables. Hayworth’s measured rate is 6 of its first 60 owners, 10 percent, within six months. Sources: https://bsandco.us/blog-post/repeat-purchase-rate-benchmarks and https://everboost.co.uk/insights/what-is-a-good-repeat-purchase-rate/ ↩

6 · Financial projections

46
The margin widens with every ball. ↩

The margin widens with every ball. A ball costs to make and deliver, and the workshop costs a year whether it makes ten balls or ten thousand. At balls that overhead adds to each one, so the full cost is against a blended price of : a gross margin of . At balls, year two in the base case, the overhead falls to a ball and the margin rises to . At , year three, . The ball never changes; the workshop finally has enough work. †

† For scale: across eleven public direct-to-consumer brands the median gross margin is 57 percent. YETI reported 57.4 percent for 2025, Solo Brands 59.4 percent, Allbirds 41 percent. Made In has said its product gross margin is about 64 percent. Those figures are after product cost and inbound freight but before the brands’ own fulfillment; Hayworth’s counts the box and the shipping to the buyer, so like for like it sits a few points higher than shown.
47
Healthy direct-to-consumer gross margins run 50 to 70 percent, with 60 percent and above considered the threshold that affords real marketing. Public direct brands’ latest filings range from Warby Parker at 54 percent to e.l.f. Beauty at 71 percent. Sources: https://commercecatalyst.ai/benchmarks/ and https://eightx.co/blog/marketing-spend-percent-revenue-public-dtc ↩
48
The three cases, and why each would happen. ↩

9 · The hard questions

49
USTR announced the surcharge July 23, 2026, effective July 24, 2026, under new HTSUS Chapter 99 headings 9903.05.20 to 9903.05.84, with Colombia at 12.5 percent; exclusions were kept for coffee, bananas, oil and coal. Whether HTS 9506.62 (soccer balls) is excluded has not been verified; a customs broker check is pending. The tariff applies to entered value, and the plan carries a ball. A challenge was filed at the Court of International Trade July 24, 2026; entry records are kept clean for a possible refund claim. ↩
50
Tecovas had raised approximately $120 million since its inception by January 2022, when it closed a $56 million Series C (Footwear Insight); its revenue passed $100 million in its 2021 fiscal year and $250 million in 2024 (Austin American-Statesman). Its first year is in note 32. Golf’s meaning brands, their revenue and the investment behind them, are in notes 10 to 13. Sources: https://www.formula4media.com/articles/western-brand-tecovas-raises-56-million-in-funding and https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tecovas-anniversary-retail-strategy-21063778.php ↩

Austin, Texas · 2026

justin@hayworthathletic.com