Outdoor Hunting Brand Drove 317% Year-Over-Year DTC Growth While Offsetting a Retail Decline

The Situation

Vycah Gear is an outdoor apparel brand selling premium camo to hunters. Historically, nearly all revenue came from retail partners, with digital advertising playing a minimal role due to poor past performance.

The brand wanted to test whether direct-to-consumer growth was viable without sacrificing profitability. As a self-funded business, cash flow, inventory risk, and contribution margin were critical constraints. Their previous paid media strategy focused almost entirely on demand capture. It relied on bottom-of-funnel tactics that failed to drive incremental growth or bring in new customers.

As a result, online sales remained stagnant and DTC never became a meaningful revenue channel.

Vycah partnered with H Street Digital for a 3-month test starting in October 2025, during their most important season of the year.

The H Street Approach

We rebuilt Vycah’s paid media strategy around incremental growth, not just capturing existing demand.

Key priorities included:

• Shifting from retail-dependent growth to a true omnichannel model
• Using paid media to acquire new customers, not just convert existing ones
• Protecting contribution margin while scaling spend during peak season
• Leaning into outdoor-specific creative that resonated with hunters and seasonal buying behavior

Our approach combined full-funnel media, creative built specifically for the hunting audience, and strict profitability guardrails to ensure growth was sustainable despite aggressive scaling.

The Results

In just three months during peak season (Q4 2025), the results exceeded expectations:

1. Online store revenue increased 317% year over year
2. Overall contribution margin increased 294% year over year
3. Customer acquisition cost decreased by 26.46%
4. Ad spend increased 927.6% while maintaining efficiency

Conclusion

Most importantly, DTC profitability more than offset declining retail revenue. The higher margins from online sales generated additional cash flow, which is now being reinvested into inventory and continued growth.

This engagement validated DTC as a core growth channel and accelerated Vycah’s transition to a more resilient, omnichannel business model.