Earth Breeze is on a mission that requires more than good intentions. The company's eco-responsible laundry products eliminate single-use plastics, and their many charity partnerships multiply the positive impact of every purchase. But as founder and CEO Jon Wedel understood clearly, making a large-scale impact on the world means building a financially sustainable business first. "Planet-before-profit" is a values statement, not a business model.
That clarity of purpose made the challenge Earth Breeze faced even more pressing: with customers buying through multiple channels and multiple purchase structures, the financial picture had become genuinely complex—and difficult to plan around.
The Complexity Hiding Inside a Simple Product
Earth Breeze sells through a Shopify-powered website, online retailers including Amazon and Walmart, and brick-and-mortar retailers around the world. Customers can make one-time purchases or opt for monthly or annual subscriptions. The result is a matrix of customer segments, each with different purchasing behavior, different retention patterns, and—critically—different lifetime value.
Intellectually, the team knew this. Intuitively, they understood that a subscriber acquired on DTC behaved very differently from a one-time Amazon buyer. But the difference was impossible to quantify with precision. And without precision, the questions that mattered most had no good answers.
How much is each customer type actually worth? What should Earth Breeze be willing to pay to acquire them? And given limited marketing resources, what's the ideal mix of customers to target?
These aren't abstract financial questions. They're the questions that determine whether growth is profitable or just expensive—whether scaling the business makes it stronger or puts cash under pressure in ways that are hard to reverse.
From Intuition to Intelligence
When Earth Breeze started working with Drivepoint, the first priority was getting clarity on customer segmentation. Drivepoint's analyst team designed custom segments for each customer type, building in the unique attributes of their orders—channel, purchase structure, subscription cadence. With that segmentation framework in place, the team modeled historical and predicted retention for each segment by cohort to arrive at an accurate LTV measure for each customer type.
That foundation unlocked the real strategic work. Drivepoint then modeled the impact on growth, profit, and cash from different mixes of segment types and different levels of ad spend. The goal was specific: uncover the most profitable and least risky path to growth. The platform made managing all those scenarios straightforward and kept the forecasts simple to update as new financial data came in.
EVP Finance Jordan Benjamin described the result: "Drivepoint is like having a FP&A super team at my fingertips. I always know where we stand and can answer any questions I have about our business, our data or our finances, no matter how complex."
Confident Capital Allocation
Starting from a position of significant unknowns, Earth Breeze arrived at a much richer and more accurate understanding of what different customers are actually worth to the business. That understanding had immediate, practical consequences for how they operate.
Armed with a strong model and new insights, Earth Breeze had the confidence to set the right guardrails on customer acquisition cost while scaling revenue aggressively with positive profit margins. They weren't guessing at the right CAC ceiling or hoping the math would work out—they knew what each segment could support and could invest accordingly.
Jon Wedel put it plainly: "Drivepoint helps us clearly paint the picture of what our future could look like so we can make capital allocation decisions with confidence. We're making bold moves based on the outputs. So far, Drivepoint has massively over-delivered on a price to value basis."
What Earth Breeze Got Right
The lesson in Earth Breeze's story isn't that they had a unique problem. Many consumer brands with subscription models, multi-channel distribution, and diverse customer segments are sitting on the same uncertainty—they just haven't quantified it yet.
What Earth Breeze got right was recognizing that the cost of not knowing was real. Flying blind on LTV doesn't just mean slightly suboptimal marketing spend. It means systematically under- or over-investing in customer acquisition, misallocating resources across channels, and making growth bets without understanding whether they improve or erode the business.
Building a clear, accurate model of customer lifetime value by segment—and updating it continuously with real financial data—isn't a sophisticated finance department luxury. For a brand built on a mission that requires profitable growth to sustain, it's a strategic necessity.
Drivepoint is the intelligent FP&A platform built exclusively for consumer brands. If you're managing complex customer segments and want the financial clarity to grow with confidence, book a demo to see how Drivepoint can build that picture for your business.
