Benchmarks
Revenue per employee at D2C brands
Eight public D2C brands, taken from their latest annual reports. They run from $216K to $2.13M per person, and most of that gap comes from what each brand does in-house.
Work out yours
Count full-time staff and contractors who work like staff. Leave out your 3PL and agencies. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Revenue per person
$926K
The benchmarks
| Brand | Fiscal year | Revenue | People | Per person | What drives headcount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Honest Company | Dec 2025 | $371M | 174 | $2.13M | All full-time, plus a limited number of temporary staff and consultants |
| e.l.f. Beauty | Mar 2026 | $1.6B | 849 | $1.93M | Products made by third-party manufacturers; full-time count |
| FIGS | Dec 2025 | $631M | 388 | $1.63M | One fulfillment center and a small set of Community Hubs |
| Hims & Hers | Dec 2025 | $2.3B | 2,442 | $961K | Telehealth; headcount grew from 1,046 at the end of 2023 |
| BARK | Mar 2026 | $395M | 501 | $788K | About 301 of its people are based in the Philippines |
| Purple | Dec 2025 | $469M | 1,100 | $426K | Makes its own mattresses and runs showrooms |
| Lovesac | Feb 2026 | $697M | 1,882 | $370K | 917 full-time and 965 part-time associates |
| Warby Parker | Dec 2025 | $872M | 4,036 | $216K | 323 retail stores and two optical labs |
Revenue is net revenue for the fiscal year from each company's SEC financial data. People is the total headcount reported in the same 10-K, part-time included. Brand names link to their filings. Pulled October 2026.
What drives the gap
The bottom three all run physical operations. Warby Parker has 323 stores and two optical labs. Purple makes its own mattresses and runs showrooms. Lovesac has more part-time associates than full-time ones. Every store, factory, and lab adds people, and those people do work that software can't take over.
The top three keep their own headcount close to the office. e.l.f. has its products made by third-party manufacturers. FIGS ships from one fulfillment center. Honest runs on 174 full-time employees.
Once the stores and factories are accounted for, what's left is office headcount: support, media buying, planning, finance, and the people who move information between them. That's the part of the number AI is changing.
One caveat: public companies report employees only. A brand that leans on agencies and contractors looks more efficient on this measure than it really is.
Where a $10M to $100M brand lands
Private brands don't publish headcount, so there's no clean benchmark at this size. The closest thing we have is the Zero Hire Org Chart, a composite of how D2C brands around $50M tend to be staffed.
With 54 people, that brand does $926K per person, about where Hims & Hers is. Rebuilt for what AI can do in 2026, it needs 26 people and does $1.92M per person, which puts it level with e.l.f. and close to Honest.
For reference: the big names
From the same kind of filings, for the companies people usually quote:
- NVIDIA: $5.14M per person ($215.9B revenue, 42,000 employees, fiscal year ending Jan 2026)
- Meta: $2.55M per person ($201.0B revenue, 78,865 employees, fiscal year ending Dec 2025)
- Shopify: $1.52M per person ($11.6B revenue, 7,600 employees, fiscal year ending Dec 2025)
Shopify, a software company, comes in below Honest, e.l.f., and FIGS. What holds a product brand's number down is the operations it chooses to own.
Questions
How do you calculate revenue per employee?
Divide annual revenue by the number of people. Use the last twelve months of net revenue, and count people the same way every time you measure, so the trend means something.
What's a good revenue per employee for an ecommerce brand?
Among the public D2C brands above, the leanest three do $1.63M to $2.13M per person. Hims & Hers and BARK, with no stores but bigger in-house teams, do $788K to $961K. The ones with stores, showrooms, or their own manufacturing do $216K to $426K.
Should contractors count?
Count the ones who work like staff: same hours, same tools, same manager. Leave out your 3PL and agencies, or compare against brands that count them the same way.
How do I plan next year's headcount against this?
The free headcount planning template tracks revenue per person today and next year as you plan each seat, and it includes these benchmarks.