Assembled Brands Portfolio Companies More than Double in Q4

Business Insights | Annual Metrics

This year, our team is excited to double down on the business insights component of our three-pronged offering. In doing so, we hope to catalyze an industry-wide trend in which data-driven investment structures present an increasingly compelling alternative financing model to venture capital.

As our team sat down at the beginning of this year, we reflected on the growth in funds invested over the past 12 months at Assembled Brands (https://assembledbrands.com/). In doing so, we honed in on key portfolio-wide areas of growth since we began actively investing in Q4 2018.

In this report, we’ll focus on the following metrics for our brands’ sales through Shopify: Gross Sales, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Percent of Orders from Repeat Customers and Online Sessions.

Sales Growth

Brands in the Assembled Brands portfolio grew 101% in the fourth quarter of 2019 as compared to the same period in 2018. This is significantly higher growth than the industry standard, which according to Statista, grew 13.4%. For context, YoY sales growth in the retail e-commerce sector for more mature companies was estimated to land at around 5%.

This sales delta not only underscores the strength of our existing investments but also validates our underlying thesis at Assembled Brands, that every brand in every category will be reinvented over the next decade. We predict that our emerging cohort of consumer brands will continue to outperform incumbents over the next decade.

Conversion Rate

The median conversion rate in our portfolio was 2.2% about 18% above the industry average conversion rate of 1.85%.

Average Order Value

The median Average Order Value (AOV) of companies in the Assembled Brands portfolio was $139, with apparel brands averaging significantly higher at $239 per order.

Repeat Customer Purchase Rate

Across the portfolio, approximately 37% of the orders in the fourth quarter came from customers returning to a brand. This figure is up from 31% across the same period a year prior.

Apparel brands also lead the way, averaging 42% of their orders from repeat customers.

Online Sessions

Online sessions grew 46% across our portfolio in Q4. Notably, tracking online sessions as opposed to unique monthly visitors (UMV) is a better index of a customer’s buying intention because each session presents a distinct, independent shopping event.

Within the context of individual online sessions, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is deeply impactful in the process of increasing revenue per visitor and lowering a company’s average customer acquisition cost (CAC).