Winning Plays: Scaling Sports Apparel With Data Clarity

Winning Plays: Scaling Sports Apparel With Data Clarity
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500 LEVEL is a fan-driven sports apparel brand with one mission: capture the energy of the game in every piece of gear. With an eight-figure annual revenue base, the company was already growing fast. But they weren’t satisfied with steady growth, they wanted to accelerate, move faster, and capture more of the market.

That’s when they turned to Onward.
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“When you hire Onward you get expertise, you get project management, you get execution and media buying, you get engineer, you get a small scrappy team of digital marketers.”  – Ryan Donovan, CMO, 500 LEVEL

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Building Clarity and Speed

Onward helped 500 LEVEL transform how they approached growth. Instead of siloed reports and gut-based decisions, everything was tied back to a clear, real-time source of truth. Marketing, analytics, and growth teams could finally work from the same playbook.

Key unlocks included:

• CAC and ROI modeling to guide paid media investments
• Faster social marketing testing around big moments in sports
• Day-over-day clarity on attribution and margin
  
  

“It’s very easy to execute marketing when you have a single source of truth and you can point to the dashboard and see how you’re doing day over day, month over month, and year over year. It’s clear as day.”  – Ryan Donovan, CMO, 500 LEVEL

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Game-Changing Results

With the right visibility and execution in place, 500 LEVEL hit breakout numbers:

• 83% year-over-year growth in D2C revenue
• 40% increase in new customer acquisition YoY
• 49x  lift in team apparel revenue following the Stanley Cup

From Momentum to Machine

For 500 LEVEL, working with Onward wasn’t about chasing one-off wins. It was about building a durable growth engine. Now, they operate with speed, precision, and confidence, and their fans are showing up bigger than ever.

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