Why Unique Vintage Replaced ROAS With Contribution Margin Per View

Most apparel brands know their gross margins. Fewer know whether the traffic they are paying for actually generates profit after returns, fulfillment, and media costs are factored in at the product level.

That gap between revenue reporting and profit reality is where a lot of marketing budgets quietly leak. And for brands managing thousands of SKUs across multiple channels, intuition alone cannot close it.

Rita Zahir, VP of Marketing and E-commerce at Unique Vintage, has spent the last two years rebuilding how the 25-year-old vintage-inspired fashion brand measures performance, allocates spend, and converts community engagement into commercial outcomes. Speaking at eTail Palm Springs 2026, Zahir laid out a measurement philosophy that challenges one of e-commerce’s most entrenched metrics and replaces it with something far more precise.

Community is not a brand exercise if no one comes back to buy

Unique Vintage is not a typical DTC brand. Founded in 2000, it sells vintage-inspired fashion (not actual vintage) in sizes from extra small through 5X, built on a customer community that treats getting dressed as a form of self-expression. Zahir came to the brand from roles at Awa Inspired in luxury resale and Vesta Collective in DTC jewelry, bringing experience across very different e-commerce models.

What she found was a genuinely passionate community, but one without the structure to drive measurable business results.

“This is an amazing community, but there isn’t the structure aspect of it that leads to really supporting the business,” she said.

Customers would buy something for an event, participate in the community, but never make a second purchase.

Zahir’s response was not to overhaul the community’s character but to layer performance discipline on top of it. She introduced goals and KPIs to every campaign, interaction, and engagement initiative. The focus shifted to owned channels: email, SMS, and organic social were rebuilt so that subscribers were getting genuine value, interacting more frequently, and pushing the repurchase rate upward.

“You can do brand storytelling and engagement and still have that performance aspect built in,” Zahir said. “And I think that was transformative for our business.”

For senior marketers running community-led brands, this is the operational challenge that rarely gets discussed. Authentic communities generate real loyalty, but without LTV-to-CAC measurement and structured retention KPIs, that loyalty stays emotional rather than commercial.

The metric most marketers rely on is hiding the real answer

The deeper transformation at Unique Vintage has been in how the team measures profit itself. Zahir described a fundamental shift away from the intuition-led decision-making common in founder-led organizations, toward a data infrastructure that aligns the entire business to a single North Star.

“A lot of marketers look at ROAS, for example,” Zahir said. “But you’ve got to really think about profit. So POAS, profit on ad spend.” The distinction matters because ROAS can mask categories with high return rates, low margins, or third-party product economics that erode profitability even as sales numbers look healthy. “You can drive sales all day of a category that maybe has a super high return rate. The margin is low because it’s not your brand. All these things can contribute, and then at the end of the day, you’re paying customers to purchase your items.”

The metric her team now optimizes around is contribution margin per view. It consolidates media spend, view volume, return rates, fulfillment costs, and product-level margins into a single number that tells the team exactly where profit is coming from at the SKU level. With 15,000 SKUs in the catalog, that precision is not optional. “When you have 15,000 SKUs, you have to be doing that,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s sort of guessing.”

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Zahir’s shift from ROAS to contribution margin per view reflects the broader measurement gap that Fospha addresses. Where legacy attribution models capture only the last click, missing the impressions and views that build demand, Fospha delivers the only full-funnel MMM with daily, ad-level insights, built for teams to grow DTC, Amazon, and beyond. For lean teams managing thousands of SKUs across channels, the ability to see true profitability daily and at the ad level is exactly the measurement precision Zahir describes needing.

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AI did not replace intuition, it gave intuition something to work with

The shift was powered by AI. Zahir’s team partnered with Bark AI to build predictive models that ingest data from multiple channels and surface actionable insights about where profit is concentrated. Instead of category-level gross margin estimates, the team now sees real-time contribution margin at the product level, enabling them to prioritize spend, views, and impressions toward the most profitable products.

The impact has extended well beyond marketing. “That clarity, the precision, has fundamentally changed how we do everything: merchandising, promotions, even product forecasting, reordering, inventory levels,” Zahir said. The entire organization has aligned around contribution margin as the shared metric, replacing what she described as fragmented margin definitions that made cross-functional alignment difficult.

Zahir made the point that budget size does not change the underlying problem. She referenced a $30 million media budget at Symantec earlier in her career. “It’s still limited in terms of, you can’t address the entire addressable market. So how do you prioritize? How do you create weighted CPAs? How do you really understand the profit that you are getting as a return?”

Her answer: “It’s going to be a lot less intuition. It’s going to be contextually intuition-based. But then we’re going to use data that we’re all aligned to a North Star.”

Size inclusivity is expensive, and most brands have quietly walked away

In a rapid-fire segment, Zahir was direct about the state of size-inclusive fashion. Asked whether most brands are still getting it wrong, she did not hesitate. “Yes, because they gave up on it. Even the brands who claim to be size inclusive don’t even use plus-size models anymore. They are not doing campaigns based on that. They just sort of occasionally have some size runs that are bigger.”

The reason, she said, is straightforward economics. Producing extra small through 5X on every style is expensive and operationally complex. Unique Vintage has tried to remain consistent, but Zahir acknowledged the difficulty. For brands that position inclusivity as a value proposition, the gap between marketing claims and production commitments is widening.

On licensed collaborations with properties like Disney and Barbie, Zahir called them “a lot of work” but confirmed they have been an accelerator for reaching diverse customer segments through nostalgia. And on TikTok’s vintage aesthetic trend, she was measured: the platform drives traffic and engagement, but identifying the right customer segments and building strategic structure around them remains a work in progress.

What this means for senior marketers

Zahir’s argument is straightforward but carries real implications. ROAS, the metric most e-commerce teams still organize around, does not account for the full cost of generating a sale. Contribution margin per view does. And with AI tools now capable of computing that metric across thousands of SKUs in real time, the case for continuing to rely on blunter instruments is weakening.

The community insight is equally pointed. Authentic engagement without performance structure is a brand asset that never converts to a commercial one. Adding KPIs to community initiatives does not make them less authentic. It makes them sustainable.

Twenty years into her career, spanning Famous Footwear, Shoes.com, Four Wheel Parts, and now Unique Vintage, Zahir’s operating principle has remained consistent: understand the customer through data, build predictive models around their behavior, and let that drive decisions regardless of the industry.

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