Ryan Miller didn’t build Peaky Hats to chase hype.
He built it because he cared deeply about product, craftsmanship, and the people who wore his hats.
Three years in, Peaky Hats had become something rare in e-commerce:
a cult brand with real fans, a founder with obsessive standards, and a product so good that customers naturally came back for more.
But behind the scenes, Ryan was stretched thin.
He was the founder.
The creative director.
The paid media buyer.
The email marketer.
The brand guardian.
And while the business was working, it wasn’t working as efficiently, scalably, or sustainably as it could.
Ryan didn’t need someone to “fix” Peaky.
He needed the right driver for a machine that was already powerful.
That’s where TVG came in.
When Ryan came to TVG, Peaky Hats was already winning:
A deeply loyal customer base
A strong product-market fit
Healthy ad performance
High repeat purchase behavior
A clear, intentional brand voice
But success had created a new problem.
Ryan was becoming the bottleneck.
As he put it:
At the same time, the systems underneath the brand weren’t built to scale:
Email and SMS lacked structure, consistency, and lifecycle strategy
Design and brand expression weren’t fully unified across channels
Paid was profitable, but not yet being pushed to its true ceiling
Key metrics like LTV, MER, and NCAC weren’t being actively leveraged as growth levers
The brand wasn’t broken.
It just hadn’t been given a real growth engine yet.
TVG approached Peaky differently than most engagements.
We weren’t there to reinvent the brand.
We were there to operationalize it.
That meant three things:
Turn intuition into infrastructure
We took what Ryan already knew worked and translated it into scalable systems:
A real retention lifecycle (flows, segmentation, cadence, personalization)
Brand-consistent creative systems across email, ads, and site
Predictable acquisition economics driven by MER, LTV, and NCAC
Scale only when efficiency allowed it
Instead of chasing ROAS vanity metrics, we focused on:
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) to measure holistic profitability
LTV : NCAC ratios to determine how aggressively we could scale
Blended performance, not siloed channel results
This allowed us to push growth without breaking the business.
Give the founder his time back
By absorbing execution across ads, email, SMS, and creative, Ryan regained focus where it mattered most:
Product
Community
Partnerships
Vision
As Ryan described it:
That moment captured exactly what this partnership was about:
performance, without sacrificing soul.
In just 60 days, Peaky Hats saw:
Meaning:
That’s controlled, disciplined, profitable growth.
Great brands don’t need reinvention, they need infrastructure.
MER and LTV are better scaling guides than ROAS alone.