.png)
Hat Club improves media efficiency by 30% and saves 10+ hours per week with Triple Whale
Hat Club has been redefining headwear culture since 1992. Known for limited-edition drops, custom colorways, and licensed fitted hat designs that go far beyond standard stadium merchandise, the brand has built a loyal community of sports-adjacent customers who want fashion-forward products that stand out from mass-market offerings.
Originally a brick-and-mortar business, ecommerce became an equal, if not larger, part of the Hat Club’s business by 2018. Today, the company sells to customers across more than five paid ad channels, with a marketing mix that spans paid media, search, email, SMS and organic social. As that mix grew more complex, having a transparent and accurate view of performance grew increasingly critical for business decisions.
When Steve Berman joined as Hat Club’s Marketing Data + Analytics Manager, he inherited a multi-channel marketing engine driving significant revenue impact. What the company didn’t have was an analytics foundation that the entire company, from performance to C-suite, could use to inform company-wide decisions. Triple Whale arrived the same week Steve did — timing that would prove transformative in how the business made decisions.
Challenge
As Hat Club's ecommerce business scaled, the company recognized real opportunities to strengthen its measurement foundation and unlock more growth.
Like many multi-channel brands, Hat Club invests across numerous channels like Meta, TikTok, Google, Klaviyo, Postscript and more, creating the classic attribution dilemma: when they added up what each platform reported in conversions, the total far exceeded actual revenue, nearly 3x as much.
“Before Triple Whale, the team was looking at each channel on its own platform, adding it all up, and realizing the numbers were nearly 2x what we actually made. That led to a significant lack of confidence in the agency-reported and platform-reported data.” – Steve Berman, Marketing Data + Analytics Manager
This disconnect not only created uncertainty around which channels actually drove results, but also eroded executive trust and made strategic budget decisions look more like guesswork. Without an accurate view of performance, decisions felt riskier than they needed to be, especially for a business aiming for double-digit annual growth.
At the same time, Hat Club’s product catalog added another layer of complexity. Thousands of SKU combinations across sizes, logos, patches, and colorways made product analysis tedious and manual. Steve and his team spent up to 20 hours a week pulling data into Google Sheets just to gather meaningful insights. Simple, ad hoc questions, such as comparing specific product releases or investigating unexpected trends, took hours to answer. The team was often stuck assembling reports, leaving little to no time for strategic analysis and growth optimization.
Hat Club needed better measurement. A solution that could provide both granular channel insights for daily optimization and reliable executive-level reporting for strategic decisions.
Solution
Rebuilding confidence through a dual-attribution strategy
Triple Whale's flexible Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) models became Hat Club's foundation for restoring data confidence. Steve implemented a sophisticated dual-lens attribution approach: using Total Impact, which combines clicks, views, and post-purchase surveys, for executive reporting, and Clicks & Views, a fully-deterministic click and view-through model, for daily channel optimization.
"I use Clicks & Views to optimize within channels because that shows what’s actually happening. Total Impact, on the other hand, tells me what’s happening plus what people believe influenced their purchase.” – Steve Berman
This strategy addressed leadership's core concern: for the first time, the sum of channel attributions actually matched Shopify revenue. That alignment alone restored trust in the data and gave leadership a clear understanding of performance.
Turning product complexity into near-instant insights with Moby
Hat Club's product complexity made product analysis extremely time-consuming. Moby transformed this bottleneck into a competitive edge.
The team now uses Moby to analyze sell-through across their product catalog. Analysis that previously took hours now only takes minutes. When leadership needs ad hoc comparisons of specific product releases or colorways, they just ask Moby, and get powerful analysis and reports. This compounds time savings: Moby eliminates 10+ hours of manual analysis every week.
"The biggest value Moby provides is its ability to create ad hoc, one-off tables or reports. Instead of taking someone half a day to put together, it's immediate." – Steve Berman
Using Custom Dashboards to catch problems before they become expensive
The team also built Custom Dashboards in Triple Whale to keep a close eye on metrics critical to Hat Club's growth, particularly mobile app performance, given the high lifetime value of app users.
This continuous monitoring recently surfaced a major issue early: a technical problem was causing Hat Club to lose hundreds of daily app installs, something that had gone unnoticed for weeks.
"When you look at it, that’s potentially hundreds of new customers a day installing our app, which has a crazy high LTV. Catching that early prevented what could have been a five- to six-figure problem." – Steve Berman
Email optimization that pays for itself
The team also enabled Sonar Send, Triple Whale's data enrichment for email and SMS that uses enriched attribution data to optimize email campaigns. Steve tracks the incremental revenue Sonar Send generates every week, using it as proof of value for Triple Whale, when reporting to Hat Club’s leadership.
"Sonar Send pays for Triple Whale all on its own. The incremental revenue we generate from the email enrichment more than covers the cost of the platform. It's a great way for me to demonstrate to our CEO that Triple Whale is a worthwhile investment." – Steve Berman
The incremental email revenue alone justifies the platform's cost, something Hat Club's CEO mentions to investors as an example of software that delivers immediate ROI.
The primary benefit for the company as a whole is the simplification and increased confidence in marketing performance reporting. It's business intelligence that we can be confident in when making decisions around budget or direction.
.svg)
.webp)
.webp)
