Digital Brands Group said on September 24, 2026 that AVO, its collegiate licensing brand, grew revenue 221% year over year between August 1 and September 11 while spending 78% less on digital marketing than in the same weeks of 2025. Not one dollar amount accompanied the percentages.

In Short

A company that sells college-branded clothing online says one of its brands took in far more money this August and early September than a year earlier, while spending much less on online advertising. If the two years are measured the same way, that would mean most of last year's ad money brought back very little, and anyone who buys ads or reads company claims about ad returns has a stake in whether that holds up. The brand now plans a new website in early October and says it will spend more on advertising once each dollar returns five dollars in sales, but it has not shown the actual sums behind any of its percentages.

What Digital Brands Group put on the record

Digital Brands Group, an apparel and e-commerce company based in Austin, Texas, and listed on Nasdaq under the ticker DBGI, distributed the results at 8:18 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, September 24. The only contact named on the release is the company's investor relations department. That detail matters. This was a document addressed to shareholders, and its subject was a marketing account.

According to Digital Brands Group, four figures describe AVO's performance over the period. Revenue rose 221% year over year from August 1 through September 11, 2026, which puts it at 3.21 times the level of the same window in 2025. Digital marketing spend fell 78% against the same period in 2025, leaving it at 22% of the prior year's outlay. Return on ad spend over the period was 3.65x. And among universities that joined the AVO programme during 2026, weekly net revenue increased 442% from Week 1, the week of August 1, to Week 6, the week of September 5, meaning the sixth week produced 5.42 times the net revenue of the first.

The dates line up precisely. August 1, 2026 fell on a Saturday and September 11 on a Friday, so the headline window runs 42 days, or six seven-day weeks, with Week 6 covering September 5 to 11. The weekly series and the year-over-year comparison therefore describe the same stretch of the calendar.

Hil Davis, chief executive of Digital Brands Group, framed the results as a question of efficiency. "We are encouraged by the combination of strong revenue growth and substantially lower marketing expenditures," he said. Davis added that the company's "target is to achieve a 5x ROAS, which would provide a foundation to scale digital advertising investment alongside revenue."

The company went further in its own commentary. According to Digital Brands Group, the combination of higher revenue, lower customer-acquisition spending and improving return on ad spend gives it room to raise marketing investment as the business shows it can grow faster than its costs.

Three measures, three different bases

Read closely, the release mixes measures that are not interchangeable.

The headline growth figure is for revenue. The 442% figure is for weekly net revenue. Net revenue in retail reporting usually excludes returns and discounts, but the release defines neither term, and it does not say whether the 221% comparison is gross or net.

The 442% number also applies to a subset. It covers only universities added in 2026, and the release gives no count of those schools, no share of AVO revenue they represent and no comparable figure for schools already on the programme. A school in its first week of trading starts from a low base almost by definition. A five-fold rise from that base over six weeks says something about how quickly a new partnership ramps up, and rather less about the efficiency of AVO's advertising.

The same subset complicates the year-over-year comparison. Schools added in 2026 would have had no AVO sales in August 2025. Any revenue they generated this year adds to the 221% figure without a matching prior-year base. How much of the growth came from new schools and how much from existing ones, the release does not say.

Then there is return on ad spend itself. The conventional definition divides revenue by advertising cost, so 3.65x would mean $3.65 of revenue for each dollar of advertising. But which revenue? The release does not state whether the figure is platform-attributed, meaning revenue that ad systems credit to their own ads, or blended, meaning all AVO revenue divided by all advertising spend. Nor does it name the channels, the attribution model, or the lookback window used to decide which sales count.

The arithmetic the release implies

Two of the published percentages can be combined. If revenue is 3.21 times its prior level and digital marketing spend is 0.22 times its prior level, revenue per dollar of digital marketing rose by a factor of about 14.6.

That produces a striking implication. If the 3.65x ROAS is calculated as total AVO revenue divided by the same digital marketing spend in both years, the equivalent figure for August and early September 2025 would have been roughly 0.25. In other words, AVO would have been spending about four dollars on digital marketing for every dollar of revenue a year ago.

Is that plausible? It could be, for a brand building an audience at a loss. It could also be an artefact of mixing an attributed return metric with a total-spend comparison, in which case the implied prior figure means nothing at all. Digital Brands Group did not publish AVO's 2025 return on ad spend, so the release neither confirms nor rules out either reading.

Margin is the other missing input. A return on ad spend covers advertising costs only if gross margin is high enough: the break-even point is the reciprocal of the margin. At 3.65x, revenue credited to advertising pays for that advertising only if AVO's gross margin exceeds about 27.4%. At the 5x target, the threshold falls to 20%. The release gives no gross margin for AVO. Licensed college merchandise normally also carries royalty payments to the institutions whose marks appear on it, a cost the release does not quantify.

The calendar behind the curve

The 42-day window is not a random slice of the year. Early August through mid-September covers the return of students to campus and the opening weeks of the US college football season, the period in which demand for university-branded apparel would be expected to build. For schools that have traded with AVO for more than a year, comparing 2026 with the same weeks of 2025 partly controls for that seasonality. For schools added in 2026, it does not, because their Week 1 was both their first week on the programme and the start of the season.

None of this means the reported growth is illusory. It means that the release, as published, cannot separate three possible drivers: fewer wasted advertising dollars, more schools, and the calendar.

A new storefront in October

Digital Brands Group plans to put a completely redesigned e-commerce platform live for AVO during the first week of October, according to the company. It is being built by David Sosnowski, a newly appointed board member who, according to Digital Brands Group, previously served as the growth architect at Vuori during a period in which the athleisure company's revenue expanded 2400%. The release does not give the years of that period or explain what the growth architect role involved.

The rebuilt site is intended to improve conversion rates, average order value and customer engagement, according to Digital Brands Group. Those three levers map directly onto the return on ad spend target. With traffic held constant, every percentage point of improvement in conversion or order size raises revenue per advertising dollar. Moving from 3.65x to 5x requires about 37% more revenue for each dollar of advertising.

Timing adds pressure. A platform change in the first week of October leaves little room before the holiday trading period, when auction competition for consumer brands typically intensifies. PPC Land reported on September 23 that 59% of direct-to-consumer brands in a Tatari client survey planned bigger Black Friday television budgets, from a sample of 41 marketers questioned between July 13 and July 24, 2026. Digital Brands Group describes the October platform as another potential catalyst. Whether it lands cleanly will be visible only in figures the company has yet to publish.

The corporate backdrop

The AVO results did not arrive in isolation. The forward-looking statements attached to the release list, among the factors that could cause results to differ, "the possibility that the strategic review process may not result in any transaction", along with the disruptive effect of that review on the business and uncertainty over the timing and structure of any deal.

Three other Digital Brands Group releases appear alongside it, shown only as excerpts and without dates. According to the company, one is an investor update on what the company calls its U.S. Program and on a go-private process and timeline, and states that details of a $165 million contract were disclosed in Form 8-K filings on July 27, 2026 and September 2, 2026. A second says the company executed a binding contract for $3.3 million in guaranteed cash flow for the U.S. Program from September 1 through December 31, 2026, drawn from the first two markets of the larger $165 million programme, which runs over two years. A third says the company forecasts positive cash flow starting in September, led by the collegiate programme, with expanding government contracts expected to add to it.

Read together, the AVO numbers form part of a broader narrative aimed at investors: cash flow, contracts and a possible transaction. Marketing efficiency is one strand of that story. It is also the strand least supported by disclosed dollar figures.

Why marketers read ROAS claims with caution

For advertisers and agencies, a public company leading with a return on ad spend figure is a familiar sight, and so is the scepticism that now follows such figures. PPC Land has tracked the problem for more than a year.

In July 2025, practitioners argued that a Meta return on ad spend of 2 can reflect better work than one of 10, because high attributed returns often come from crediting sales to people who were going to buy anyway. The following month, a former Meta product manager alleged in an employment tribunal filing that Shops ads return on ad spend had been inflated by 17% to 19% through the inclusion of shipping fees and taxes. On November 5, 2025, Neil Welsh, chief executive of Silverback Strategies, started a public apology campaign called Last Click Addiction over the credit agencies had let platforms take for conversions.

Definitions keep moving underneath the metric too. Amazon changed its methodology for view-based attribution on January 1, 2026 and added separate all-views reporting across Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP. The credit given to a view-through conversion, a sale after an ad was seen but not clicked, can move a reported return without any change in actual sales.

The industry's answer has been incrementality: testing what advertising adds compared with a control group that did not see it. Meta has placed lift testing above attributed sales in its suite of truth measurement framework, and in one test cited by the company, makeup brand Laura Geller recorded 3.3 times higher incremental return on ad spend from the cell optimised on incremental attribution. When Amazon pulled its Google Shopping ads globally in July 2025, one reading was that the retailer was running an incrementality stress test on its own spend.

AVO's 78% reduction looks, in part, like an unplanned version of the same experiment. If revenue rose while spend collapsed, some share of last year's spending was probably not driving sales. Without a control group, though, the reduction cannot be isolated from the arrival of new schools and the football calendar.

Case studies carry the same limits. When Chicago ad tech company Basis circulated a campaign it said had returned 6:1 against a 5:1 target in May 2026, PPC Land noted that the ratio was calculated on revenue rather than profit. Digital Brands Group's 3.65x, and the 5x ambition, carry exactly that caveat.

Spending less, as investors see it

The investor framing reflects a real split in how markets treat marketing budgets. In an IPA and Brand Finance survey of about 200 analysts and investors in the US and UK, discussed by former equities analyst Ian Whittaker, 52% said a reduction in marketing spend was a positive measure, while 36% said such reductions cause long-term damage. On the other side of the ledger, Boston Consulting Group analysis of nearly 150 US brands found that regaining lost market share costs about $1.85 for every dollar saved by trimming budgets.

For direct-to-consumer businesses, the pressure usually runs the other way from AVO's story: acquisition costs rise and revenue follows them down. ODDITY Tech, which sells beauty products online, reported record 2025 revenue on February 25, 2026 but suspended its 2026 guidance and projected a 30% first-quarter revenue decline after algorithm changes at its largest advertising platform disrupted user acquisition costs.

Digital Brands Group is telling the opposite story. It covers 42 days of one brand, with every figure expressed as a ratio. The numbers that would test it are specific: AVO's revenue and digital marketing spend in dollars, its gross margin after royalties, the split between new and existing schools, and a definition of how the 3.65x was measured. Digital Brands Group points readers to its Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for the risks surrounding its results. Whether those filings will break AVO out in enough detail to confirm the September claims remains an open question.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Digital Brands Group, a Nasdaq-listed apparel and e-commerce company based in Austin, Texas, and its collegiate licensing brand AVO. Chief executive Hil Davis commented on the results, and newly appointed board member David Sosnowski is building AVO's redesigned e-commerce platform.

What: AVO recorded 221% year-over-year revenue growth, a 78% reduction in digital marketing spend against the same period of 2025, a 3.65x return on ad spend and a 442% rise in weekly net revenue among universities added in 2026. The company gave no dollar figures, no definition of return on ad spend and no gross margin, and set a 5x return on ad spend target tied to a platform rebuild.

When: The figures cover August 1 through September 11, 2026, a 42-day window, and were published on September 24, 2026. The redesigned platform is scheduled for the first week of October 2026.

Where: AVO sells licensed college merchandise through its own online store, shopavo.la, in the United States. The results were distributed from Austin, Texas.

Why: Digital Brands Group presents the figures as evidence that AVO can grow revenue without a matching rise in marketing spend, within a wider investor narrative that includes cash flow forecasts, a $165 million U.S. Program and a go-private process. For marketers, the claim lands amid long-running disputes over attributed return on ad spend and a shift towards incrementality testing, and its percentages cannot be verified until the underlying dollar amounts are disclosed.