7-Figure lifestyle apparel brand
7-Figure lifestyle apparel brand: turned email into a stable revenue channel across 12 months of seasonality
A lifestyle apparel brand came to us with an inflated profile count, emails landing in Promotions, and a Welcome flow that wasn’t converting. Twelve months later, email was consistently delivering 20-30% of monthly revenue across seasons, deliverability had been rebuilt from the ground up, and Klaviyo reported 62% year-over-year email revenue growth. The brand kept doing what it had always done — what changed was that email stopped being the unreliable channel.
+62%
year-over-year email revenue (Aug 2024 vs Aug 2023, per Klaviyo)
1.4% → 4.5%
mobile pop-up submit rate (Klaviyo “Excellent” benchmark)
~30%
of monthly revenue from email in peak months, up from ~15% at audit
The brand
A lifestyle apparel brand with a distinctive design point of view and a loyal community. Total monthly revenue in the $25-65k range depending on the season, with regular new product drops as the core business rhythm. Active Klaviyo account, an existing flow setup, campaigns going out consistently. The team had been running email themselves but knew the channel wasn’t pulling its weight.
The product was strong. The marketing calendar was full. Email was the part that didn’t feel reliable.
The leak
The initial audit showed an account that looked functional but had problems running underneath.
Campaign open rates at 25.6%. Klaviyo’s recommended floor is 30%; healthy brands sit in the 40-50% range. Open rates this low almost always mean Promotions or Spam placement, not inbox.
Several emails landed in Spam during the audit itself. Deliverability was the root cause behind most of the other problems.
Pop-up converting at 1.4% on mobile. Klaviyo’s target is 3%+ mobile and 6%+ desktop. The form was capturing maybe a third of what it should have been.
Flow structure was thin. Welcome and Abandoned Cart existed but were short, dated, and image-heavy — which hurt deliverability further. Winback was incomplete. SMS wasn’t coordinated with email.
Email contributed only ~15% of total revenue in slow months, and was inconsistent month-to-month. The channel couldn’t be planned around.
The foundation we built
We rebuilt the systems in the order that protected the next one.
Deliverability first
Before touching content or design, we addressed why emails weren’t reaching the inbox. Set up a dedicated sending domain. Reduced image-heavy emails in favor of HTML-based templates. Tightened segmentation to send mostly to engaged subscribers (30- and 60-day windows) while reputation rebuilt. Within four months, campaign open rates moved from 25.6% to 53.7%. They reached 62.3% — rated “Excellent” against Klaviyo benchmarks — and held there for the rest of the year, including at higher sending frequencies.
Pop-up rebuild
A/B tested offer types ($15 off vs. percentage discount vs. free hat), timing (immediate vs. multi-page-view triggered), copy variants, and form structure. The combination that landed: a multi-page-view trigger paired with a dollar-off offer, which pushed mobile submit rate to 3.85% and then to 4.47% — “Excellent” benchmark territory.
Welcome flow rebuild
Rewrote the entire Welcome flow with updated copy, new design, better sequencing, and a coordinated SMS variant timed to follow the email. The first email’s open rate moved from 22% at audit to 65%+. Click rates on that first email moved from 2.9% to 13%. Same product, same audience — different infrastructure delivering it.
Core flow ecosystem
Built or rebuilt every major automated flow, with email + SMS coordination across all of them:
Welcome (email + SMS)
Abandoned Cart (with conditional splits for cart size)
Browse Abandonment
Post-Purchase
Review Request
Winback
Sunset
Every system contributing instead of one carrying the load.
Campaign rhythm
Established a 2-3 emails/week cadence with proper segmentation. Built holiday calendars in advance (Black Friday, Christmas, Memorial Day) rather than scrambling. Campaign open rates that started at 25.6% finished the year consistently in the 50-60% range — above the 40% benchmark, even at higher sending frequency.
The results
The headline isn’t dramatic growth — it’s reliability. Over 12 months, email became a channel the brand could plan around.
+62% year-over-year email revenue in August 2024 vs August 2023, per Klaviyo’s own reporting. A meaningful gain in a slow month for the category.
Email’s share of total revenue moved from ~15% at audit to consistently 20-30% through most of the year. The brand could now budget around it.
Campaign open rate: 25.6% → 62.3%. From “Fair/Poor” to “Excellent” on Klaviyo’s scale. Open rates above 50% became the new normal.
Mobile pop-up submit rate: 1.4% → 4.5%. From “Fair” to “Excellent” on Klaviyo’s scale.
Welcome flow Email #1 open rate: 22% → 65%+. Click rate on the same email: 2.9% → 13%.
SMS list and SMS Welcome flow built from zero. A second owned channel running in coordination with email by mid-year.
Spam complaint rate held below 0.1% throughout. Unsubscribe rate stabilized under 1% even at increased sending frequency.
Top-line business revenue moved with the email system. Peak months that had previously sat in the $50-65k range climbed into the $80k+ range during the engagement. Email wasn’t the only factor — but it stopped being the bottleneck.
Why it worked
The goal was reliability, not a transformation. Every decision protected that.
Deliverability before everything else. None of the content, design, or copy work would have mattered if emails kept landing in Promotions. Rebuilding sender reputation early was what made every later improvement stick.
The Welcome flow got rebuilt, not tweaked. Going from 22% to 65% open rates on the first email isn’t a copy edit. It’s a full teardown — content, design, timing, deliverability, traffic quality — with each layer working because the one underneath it was solid.
The core 5 systems built in order. Capture, Welcome, Abandonment, Post-Purchase, Winback. No shiny objects, no AI personalization layer, no behavior-triggered logic complexity. The fundamentals that drive most of the revenue, built properly.
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