Alaskan King Crab Co. · 2026 Full-Year Forecast
New-customer revenue is media spend × aMER, with the aMER for each remaining month set off that month's own 2025 actual and then adjusted for the efficiency gain the brand has demonstrated since May. Returning-customer revenue is driven by the customer file: the trailing-twelve-month count of new orders, multiplied by that month's historical revenue-per-file-member. The two are added, never blended, so it is always visible which engine is carrying the month.
Three ways the year can close
January through August is settled — $4,396,728 of Operating Revenue is already banked or landing. September is the MLTO forecast already approved. Only October, November, and December are genuinely open, and they are worth more than the other nine months combined. Click a card to switch the whole document.
2025 comparatives are Shopify actuals via Supermetrics on the same Operating Revenue basis. January 2026 is the one month where Statlas and Shopify diverge materially (refunds are booked to the original order date in Statlas), so the January year-over-year figure understates the gap by roughly $37,000.
Do not budget Stretch. Release the incremental November and December media only if October closes at or above its Base Operating Revenue target and October aMER holds at 2.20x or better. October is a low-stakes month that tells you everything about whether the Q4 efficiency assumption is real.
The year has two halves and they are not the same business
January through April ran 27% behind last year on Operating Revenue and 37% behind on new-customer revenue. From May onward every single month has been up year over year. The forecast is built on the second business, not the first — and that is the single most important judgement in this document.
New-customer Operating Revenue turned first — May +45.9%, June +61.7%, July +36.9%, August +51.6% year over year. Returning revenue has been roughly flat across the same window. That is the correct order of operations for a recovering brand, but it means the Q4 case rests almost entirely on the acquisition engine, and the model treats it that way.
June is the evidence that this brand can be scaled into a peak
Father’s Day is one of the three largest moments of the AKC year and the only summer peak that behaves structurally like Q4: a hard shipping cutoff, a gifting buyer, and a compressed window. In June 2026 the brand put 39.5% more media behind that moment than in June 2025 and improved efficiency at the same time. That combination — scale without efficiency decay, inside a peak — is the entire basis for pressing November and December.
Inside the moment, day by day
Father’s Day fell on 21 June in 2026 and 15 June in 2025, so the windows are aligned to the holiday rather than to the calendar date.
| Window | 2026 dates | 2025 dates | 2026 Op Rev | 2025 Op Rev | Total YoY | New-cust YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Father’s Day run-up (10 days) | Jun 12–21 | Jun 6–15 | $326,625 | $252,636 | +29.3% | +60.8% |
| Shipping-cutoff peak (5 days) | Jun 14–18 | Jun 8–12 | $270,051 | $198,363 | +36.1% | +89.7% |
| Month close | Jun 26–30 | Jun 26–30 | $350,001 | $205,984 | +69.9% | +102.8% |
| Best single day | Jun 29 | Jun 30 | $102,247 | $76,372 | +33.9% | — |
In the five days around the Father’s Day shipping cutoff, new-customer revenue grew 89.7% year over year. In the five days closing the month it grew 102.8%. Those are the two windows in the AKC year that most resemble Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the December shipping cutoff — compressed, deadline-driven, gift-motivated. The Base case asks November and December for new-customer growth of 56.8% and 46.9%. June cleared that bar inside its peaks and August cleared it for a full month at +51.6%.
Spend × aMER, month by month, off each month’s own baseline
Efficiency in this business is violently seasonal — October runs near 1.9x and December near 4.5x on identical creative. Applying one blended aMER to Q4 would be meaningless. Each forecast month starts from its own 2025 actual and is adjusted by an efficiency-lift factor that steps down as spend growth steps up, because marginal efficiency degrades with volume.
| Month | 2024 aMER | 2025 aMER | 2026 aMER | Lift vs 2025 | 2025 spend | 2026 spend | Spend YoY | Basis |
|---|
The customer file is smaller than last year and that caps Q4
Returning revenue is modelled as trailing-twelve-month new orders × revenue per file member, with the yield taken from the same month last year. This is where the first four months of 2026 come back to bite: the brand acquired 1,009 new customers in January–April versus 1,697 in the same window of 2025, and those missing 688 buyers are exactly the people who would be repurchasing in November and December.
| Month | 2025 file (T12 new orders) | 2026 file | File YoY | 2025 rev / file member | 2026 rev / file member | Yield YoY | RC revenue YoY |
|---|
Per-member yield is running ahead of last year — +51% in May, +40% in June, +32% in August — because returning AOV has climbed from $516 across January–August 2025 to $619 across the same window of 2026. The Base case still only assumes a +8% yield gain in Q4, deliberately below the observed range, because a large share of Q4 repeat volume comes from gift buyers whose behaviour is less predictable than the summer file. Even with that gain, a file running 8–14% smaller month by month produces returning revenue that is roughly flat to slightly down. Every dollar of Q4 growth in this plan is acquired, not retained.
More than half the year has not happened yet
As of 20 August, 52.8% of the 2026 plan is still ahead — and 46.0% of it lands in the final three months. This is the most concentrated calendar in the Rosewater portfolio. December alone has been 26–32% of annual Operating Revenue in each of the last two years. That concentration is the reason a Q4 assumption is worth more than every H1 correction combined — and the reason the Q4 share of the year is the fastest way to sanity-check whether this forecast is credible.
January to December, month by month
Grey rows are Statlas actuals through July with August at the estimated EOM landing. The coral row is the approved September MLTO forecast. Green rows are modelled. Every column is Operating Revenue basis.
| Month | Status | Operating Rev | YoY | New | NC YoY | Returning | RC YoY | Orders | AOV | Spend | aMER | MER | CAC | CM | CM % |
|---|
The three months that decide the year
Each month is built from its own spend level, its own efficiency assumption, and its own file position. Nothing is interpolated between them.
What the full year is worth
January–August is Statlas actual. September is the MLTO model exactly as supplied. October–December applies the blended 2026 cost structure: COGS at 47.98% of Operating Revenue, merchant fees at 2.81%, and fulfilment plus shipping at the $83.00 per order the brand has run at in every month of 2026.
| Jan–Aug actual | Sep–Dec forecast | Full year 2026 | % Op Rev | 2025 | YoY |
|---|
| Scenario | FY Op Rev | CM | CM% |
|---|
What has to be true
Where this forecast could be wrong
- September’s aMER is the most aggressive single assumption in the plan. MLTO asks for 2.58x against September 2025’s 1.87x — a 37.7% year-over-year efficiency gain. The brand has actually delivered +30.1% in May, +15.9% in June, +5.6% in July and +12.8% in August, so September is being asked for more than any month this year has produced. It sits below the T30 read of 3.00x carried in the September MLTO dashboard, so it is defensible on run-rate, but it is not defensible on seasonality. If September lands at a 15% lift instead, new-customer revenue comes in near $301,000 and the month misses by roughly $60,000.
- The customer file, not the media plan, is the binding constraint on returning revenue. The trailing-twelve-month file enters Q4 between 8% and 14% below last year, month by month, because of the January–April acquisition shortfall. No amount of Q4 CRM effort rebuilds a file retroactively. If yield comes in flat to last year rather than +8%, Q4 returning revenue falls by about $160,000.
- December carries 28% of the year and 39% of full-year contribution margin. A 10% revenue miss in December at unchanged media is a $260,000 revenue miss and roughly $96,000 of contribution — larger than the entire January–April contribution combined. Nothing else in the calendar has this weight.
- The cost structure is assumed stable and it has not been tested at December volume. $83.00 per order has held in every month of 2026 and COGS has stayed inside a 45.9–49.2% band, but December runs 3,800 orders against a 1,300-order August. Freight surcharges, expedited shipping, and holiday packaging are the realistic sources of a two-to-three point cost-of-delivery drift, worth $50,000–$78,000 of December contribution.
- Marginal efficiency, not blended efficiency, is the number to watch. November spend rises 40% and December 36% year over year. The plan already assumes efficiency lift compresses as spend grows — 15% in October, 12% in November, 8% in December — but if the marginal dollar degrades faster than that, the blended aMER will still look acceptable for two or three weeks before the miss becomes visible. Track incremental cost per new customer weekly through BFCM, not blended CAC.
- No incremental promotional calendar is assumed beyond what is confirmed. October is modelled as an evergreen file-building month. If a real October offer is added, both the revenue and the October gate move, and the November and December weights should be re-cut before this document is used operationally.