Daily Harvest boosts efficiency and reduces costs 18% by switching to Klaviyo + Shopify

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Daily Harvest’s tasty and nourishing meals and snacks make it easy to eat more sustainably grown, organic fruits and vegetables every day. Today, the company’s food is sold across the country at retailers like Costco, Kroger and Target, but it all started with ecommerce. The brand currently runs on a modern stack: Shopify for ecommerce, and Klaviyo for powering smarter digital relationships with millions of email and SMS contacts.

Learn why Daily Harvest left their fragmented custom ecomm setup for a modern enterprise stack

Challenge

Daily Harvest pioneered meal subscriptions. That meant they needed a tech stack they could tailor to their unique business—and they built their site from scratch.

Almost a decade later, they still had a custom site, plus a custom reviews platform. For email marketing, they used a SaaS solution.

But the costs of complete customizability at scale were catching up to them. “We weren’t able to move really quickly anymore,” says YuJin Yong, VP of digital at Daily Harvest.

We weren’t able to move really quickly anymore.

Their email platform was powerful, but marketing needed developer support to do basic activities in the platform, such as sending and updating emails—so Daily Harvest couldn’t react to the market in real time.

“Our previous email platform required code,” Yong explains. “If we wanted to add a coupon, we had to pull a developer in who was familiar with our coupon system. If we wanted to feature specific products, we had to pull a different developer in who was familiar with our catalog.”

The custom reviews setup was cumbersome, too. Reading and responding to reviews was a manual timesuck. If the team exported reviews data for recipe developers, they had to manually clean up the pull in Excel before analysis.

And Daily Harvest needed a pricey data warehouse to house reviews data and support their email platform.

“TL;DR: It was very heavy,” Yong says of their former stack. “It was a lot of work.”

It was time for a change.

Solution

Daily Harvest evaluated multiple ecommerce solutions with help from a Klaviyo partner agency experienced with enterprise-scale migrations, Domaine.

The Daily Harvest team decided Shopify would best support efficient, continued growth. They selected Shopify for their ecommerce platform and Klaviyo for marketing platform.

Klaviyo and Shopify had the most robust, reliable integration in the market.

Klaviyo’s rapidly-expanding product suite also ticked boxes for Daily Harvest. “Our marketing platform had to be something that we felt like we could grow with,” Yong says—with future consolidation opportunities, as well as present ones.

Daily Harvest worked with Domaine on implementation, and migrated their ecommerce store to Shopify and their email marketing and reviews to Klaviyo in 4 months.

The biggest difference is really for us as a company. Our dev team is very hands off with Klaviyo.

They migrated all the data they had previously stored in their data warehouse into Klaviyo, too, and dropped that subscription plus a few data connector tools.

Next, Daily Harvest is launching their SMS program with Klaviyo, and is moving push notifications for their mobile app into Klaviyo. In total, they’re consolidating 4 tools in Klaviyo.

Overall, switching to Shopify and Klaviyo reduced the Daily Harvest team’s ecommerce-related developer hours by 15%+, and reduced their ecommerce tech costs by 18%.

It also unlocked operational efficiencies. Two marketers can run their entire email program now, pulling their own segments and building campaigns quickly with universal Klaviyo blocks.

“The biggest difference is really to us as a company,” Yong says of the new tech stack. “Our dev team is very hands off with Klaviyo.”

Strategy

Since their digital transformation, Daily Harvest has leaned on Klaviyo’s self-serve automations and segmentation to save time and personalize the customer experience. For example, the team recently stood up:

• Review automations: These are both customer-facing (a post-purchase review request flow) and internal (auto-approvals of qualifying 5-star reviews). Yong especially appreciates the ease of setting up auto-approvals in Klaviyo: “In our old site, that would have taken 2–3 months,” she says. “That would’ve been a developer ticket.”
• Net-new customer segments: In Klaviyo, Daily Harvest can easily segment customers on an expanded set of traits—from their preferred flavors to their stage in the subscription journey. In less than a year with Klaviyo, Daily Harvest built 67 segments and counting. “We’re actively leaning into all the connectivity with Shopify data,” Yong says.

Going forward, Daily Harvest will continue prioritizing tech that integrates fully with Klaviyo and Shopify, building out a modern tech ecosystem for their brand.

“We see Shopify as our ecommerce hub, and we see Klaviyo as our customer CRM hub,” Yong says. “Everything that we work with going forward should have a connection to Klaviyo and Shopify. That way, our dev team and our marketing team only need to know two core systems. It just makes processes go faster.”

We see Shopify as our ecommerce hub, and we see Klaviyo as our customer CRM hub. Everything that we work with going forward should have a connection to Klaviyo and Shopify. That way, our dev team and our marketing team only need to know two core systems. It just makes processes go faster.