Hedley & Bennett grows email + SMS revenue 66.2% YoY with Klaviyo personalization

Hedley & Bennett started making premium aprons in 2012, when founder Ellen Bennett needed a new apron. As a line cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant in L.A., her cheap ones kept disintegrating.

Bennett decided to solve her own problem and make premium aprons in her own home. The enterprise took off — today, Hedley & Bennett is a multi-million dollar culinary brand that sells aprons, knives, kitchen linens, and (soon!) cutting boards.

Learn how Hedley & Bennett drove 61x ROI in 2022 with Klaviyo email + SMS

Challenge

For years, Hedley & Bennett used Mailchimp to manage their email marketing—but as the company grew, they found the ESP didn’t have the segmentation tools they needed to serve a rapidly diversifying audience.

The brand served professional chefs through its flagship B2B operation, plus an eclectic mix of home chefs via its growing DTC business. To keep customers engaged with relevant emails, the team needed a tool built for sending personalized messaging at scale.

Solution

The team switched to Klaviyo in 2018.

The intelligent marketing automation platform let Hedley & Bennett send tightly targeted messages — not just to home chefs, but specific sub-segments like grillers, browsers who haven’t bought, or last year’s Mother’s Day gift shoppers.

Not only that, they could do it all quickly. For their lean team, being able to create a new segment “in the 5 minutes that I’m setting up an email to go out the next day is critical,” says Hedley & Bennett’s director of marketing Alice Khabituyeva.

“If I could do it again, I definitely would’ve started with Klaviyo earlier,” adds founder Ellen Bennett.

If I could do it again, I definitely would’ve started with Klaviyo earlier.

Strategy

Klaviyo has empowered Hedley & Bennett to personalize their marketing messages on email and, as of 2021, SMS. They’ve used the platform to:

• Reward their chef’s knife’s first fans: Hedley & Bennett created a wait list in Klaviyo for their first non-apron product, a chef’s knife, and promoted it via email, paid digital, and social. More than 4K people signed up in less than 2 weeks, and got early access to the knife on launch day.
• Reach customers in their preferred inbox: Brand fans can sign up for email, SMS, or both. Bennett sees a visible uptick in Shopify revenue whenever a new Klaviyo SMS campaign sends.
• Send more email, confidently: Hedley & Bennett’s team used to be “precious” about sending emails, Bennett says—worried about burdening subscribers—but Klaviyo segmentation has allowed them to ramp up send frequency and grow their list.

“We get approached all the time by Klaviyo competitors and it just doesn’t make sense to me from an integration standpoint,” says Khabituyeva. “Klaviyo works so well with our other channels.”

We get approached all the time by Klaviyo competitors and it just doesn’t make sense to me from an integration standpoint. Klaviyo works so well with our other channels.