What actually matters when scaling online retail: 6 lessons from The Bottle Club

Scaling an online retail business changes the questions you have to answer. What works at one stage often breaks at the next.

When we spoke to Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of Ecommerce at The Bottle Club, he shared what scaling really looked like inside a multi-brand, low-margin ecommerce business. From learning the economics of the business to rethinking how customers are segmented and retained, his experience highlights what becomes important as complexity increases. (Watch the full conversation here.)

Here are the practical lessons he learnt from that journey - the things that actually mattered as the business scaled.

1. Profitability has to exist before you scale

One thing Tim was clear on: The Bottle Club didn’t “find” profitability later. It had to exist from the off.

Operating on thin margins - and without external funding - forced discipline from day one. There was no room to grow recklessly and clean it up later. Every decision had to work commercially.

That mindset shaped everything, from how much could be spent on acquisition to which products it made sense to push.

The result wasn’t slower growth - it was more sustainable growth.

2. ROAS doesn’t tell you the truth

Like most ecommerce businesses, The Bottle Club initially operated around flat ROAS targets. But as the business matured, Tim realised something wasn’t adding up.

ROAS looked good - but it ignored margins and fulfilment costs, and relied on platform-led attribution.

So the team made a bold decision: they turned paid media off to understand what was really driving sales.

What they saw was revealing. Sales dropped - but nowhere near in line with what attribution models suggested. Channels that claimed to drive the majority of revenue clearly weren’t as incremental as reported.

ROAS is a signal, not a strategy. And on its own, it often lies.

3. You can’t scale what you don’t understand

As the business grew, The Bottle Club shifted from relying on channel metrics to deeply understanding the P&L behind the business.

At one point, Tim described tracking costs almost daily, including warehouse costs, fulfilment per order, and contribution by channel.

This wasn’t about being obsessive - it was about learning quickly. When margins are tight, small misunderstandings compound fast.

It also changed how external partners were evaluated. If agencies didn’t understand the business economics, performance benchmarks became meaningless.

4. Customer intent matters more than products

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from a deceptively simple change.

At checkout, The Bottle Club started asking one mandatory question: “What was the reason for your purchase?”

When analysing whiskey purchases, the team discovered that gifting behaviour was far more common than expected: around 50% were gifts.

That single insight reshaped how the business thought about customer behaviour, because customers buying gifts behaved very differently to those buying for themselves. Their likelihood to return, the timing of repeat purchases, and what messaging resonated with them all shifted.

Two customers buying the same product, it turned out, could be nothing alike.

5. Retention is where scaling becomes sustainable

As The Bottle Club scaled, it became clear that growth couldn’t rely solely on constantly acquiring new customers. Tim made the point clearly: the easiest way to waste money is to keep paying to reacquire customers you already have.

So, their focus shifted to making more of existing customers by improving how and when the business showed up for them, using better data and more thoughtful communication rather than simply increasing spend. 

Over time, stronger retention changed the economics of growth, reducing pressure on acquisition and making scale more sustainable.

Acquisition drives volume. Retention makes it profitable.

6. Scaling means being wrong (a lot)

A recurring theme in Tim’s experience was how often assumptions broke as the business grew. Ideas that felt right early on - about customers, attribution, or what drove repeat purchase - didn’t always hold up once the business reached the next stage.

Rather than defending those assumptions, the team treated them as hypotheses to be tested. When something proved wrong, it became an opportunity to learn and adjust, not a failure to hide. Over time, that mindset allowed The Bottle Club to move faster and make better decisions as complexity increased.

Tim summed it up simply: being wrong isn’t failure - it’s progress.

Lessons that only show up at scale

The Bottle Club’s journey shows that scaling doesn’t change what matters - it just makes it harder to ignore. As the business grew, assumptions around metrics, customers, and growth were tested and often broke.

What enabled sustainable scale wasn’t a new tactic, but a focus on fundamentals: clear economics, better understanding of customer intent, and the willingness to adapt when things proved wrong.

Scaling, as Tim’s experience shows, is less about being right early and more about learning fast as complexity increases.

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Want to hear more from Tim? Watch the full conversation here.