Aggregator buyers are explicit about it: brand strength is a literal line on the pro-forma. We moved that line by six points in six weeks.
A US-founded DTC home goods brand running on Shopify, fulfilling out of a 3PL in the Midwest. $2.4M trailing revenue at roughly 24% year-over-year growth, 28% blended margin after fulfillment, around 41,000 lifetime customers, a 4.7-star average across 6,300+ reviews. The founder had been approached by two aggregator-style strategics inside the prior six months and had decided the next conversation should be a structured sale process.
The product line was strong. The brand wasn't earning what it could. The Shopify front end was a $189 theme on Dawn, lightly customized in 2022. The founder narrative was a single paragraph on the About page that started "Hi, I'm…" The press kit was a Canva PDF the founder had built in an afternoon. There was no editorial content — the only words on the site outside of product descriptions were a 2023 blog post about a charity drive.
The pre-engagement comp from the founder's M&A advisor came in at 3.1× SDE. That's the floor for the category and reflects a buyer modeling the brand strength as weak. Aggregator buyers in DTC literally publish their brand-strength rubrics; we pulled three of them and the brand was scoring in the bottom quartile on five of the six dimensions.
The product was real. The reviews were real. The growth was real. The buyer's-eye read on whether the brand could survive being absorbed was the discount — and it was a six-point drag on the multiple.
One Showroom engagement, six weeks, compressed sequencing because the founder had a target date for first LOI in week 9.
The new site went live in week 4. The press kit and editorial posts landed in week 5. The hero video went up in week 6, two days before the founder's first scheduled LOI call.
The first LOI came in at 3.5× SDE. The second arrived 11 days later at 3.8× SDE from the second strategic, which kicked off a quiet bid round. The accepted LOI was 3.78× SDE from the second bidder, with a faster close and cleaner working-capital terms than the first. Final close landed 22% above the pre-engagement comp.
One quote, captured in writing during the LOI cycle and shared by the founder: "The brand reads coherent enough to slot into our portfolio without a rebuild. That's the highest score we've given a sub-$5M brand this quarter."
That sentence is the entire engagement, in one line. Aggregators publish their rubrics because they want sellers to know what they're being graded on. Most sellers don't read them. The ones who do — and who address the gaps before the diligence call — get a different number.
The customer base, the reviews, the growth curve, the margin — none of that was our work. We didn't add a single dollar of revenue. What we did: closed the gap between what the buyer's rubric was actually measuring and what the brand was visibly delivering. The six-point multiple bump came from removing a discount that was being applied in spreadsheet cells the seller couldn't see.
Composite engagement, assembled from real Brand2Sell client work. Category, revenue, multiple, and identifying detail have been altered to honor NDA. The pattern — published aggregator rubric, mid-engagement site relaunch, multiple raised between bid rounds — is consistent across the underlying engagements.