Shinola grows Klaviyo BFCM revenue 27% with boost from SMS and segmentation

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Shinola’s specialty is handcrafted watches, made in America and built to last generations. Founded in 2013, when many manufacturing jobs had left the country, Shinola built a 12,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art watch factory in Detroit and started making quality timepieces for men and women. Since then, they’ve branched out into leather goods, jewelry, home and lifestyle products, and even a Detroit hotel.

Learn how Shinola and Zettler Digital ramped up send efficiency—and reaped the rewards during BFCM

Challenge

For their first 10+ years in business, Shinola didn’t run BFCM sales. They saw themselves as a non-promotional brand, and they ran sales sparingly, often for VIP clients only.

But the organization was evolving, adapting to modern consumer preferences. Shinola moved to Klaviyo from a clunky legacy platform. Then they launched SMS with Klaviyo, after years of concern that the channel was too invasive and transactional.

“SMS is how people want to be communicated with these days,” explains Brett Vincke, Shinola’s email marketing manager.

SMS is how people want to be communicated with these days.

Shinola also started testing strategies for reaching price-sensitive shoppers. They launched an outlet vertical in their ecommerce store, and in 2023, they dipped their toe into discounting during BFCM—but positioned the sale as part of Shinola’s 10-year-anniversary celebration.

In 2024, for the first time, they decided to run promotions explicitly linked to BFCM. How would they make it a success?

Solution

In spring 2024, Shinola started working with Klaviyo partner Zettler Digital to craft a more targeted strategy for email and ramp up their new SMS channel.

This helped the brand improve deliverability, reduce send volume, and boost engagement during the year, all of which set them up for success during BFCM.

Shinola’s 2024 holiday event ran for almost 3 weeks. It was a daily drumbeat of email offers on specific products and limited-edition drops, amplified by regular SMS campaigns. During BFCM itself, they switched to a spend-more, save-more sitewide event.

Shinola focused promotional and brand emails on their most engaged customers, which helped drive growth and efficiency wins. Email revenue jumped 22% YoY during BFCM, and revenue per recipient jumped even more, by 48% YoY.

“The drum I constantly beat is deliverability,” says Ben Zettler, founder of Zettler Digital. “Who are we reaching, and who are we intentionally not reaching? That’s helped Shinola surface in the right inboxes and drive revenue per recipient up significantly.”

The drum I constantly beat is deliverability. Who are we reaching, and who are we intentionally not reaching? That’s helped Shinola surface in the right inboxes and drive revenue per recipient up significantly.

Strategy

Shinola started laying the foundation for an efficient, personalized BFCM experience months before the holiday season. Throughout 2024, Shinola and Zettler Digital worked on:

• Boosting engagement with strategic segmentation: In 2024, Shinola started sending segmented messages showing subscribers product categories they had engaged with or purchased before. The team spotlighted outlet offerings to disengaged subscribers who usually shopped sales, and retargeted non-openers of key campaigns with repeat sends. Klaviyo tools like campaign reporting by segment helped them assess which messages resonated with which segments.
• Focusing flows on high-intent events: Shinola dropped a third-party tool that let them trigger flows for top-of-funnel activity. They rebuilt their automations around Shopify and Klaviyo events, with a focus on ecommerce staples like cart and check-out abandonment.
• Never sending to their whole list—even for SMS: Even though SMS typically attracts brand superfans, Shinola still focuses SMS campaigns on subscribers who have recently engaged with email, SMS, or their website. That way, they focus their efforts on the people most likely to engage without excessively restricting reach.

With BFCM behind them, Shinola has seen the value add of SMS, and they’re ready to dig deeper into strategy and growth for the channel. They plan to position it more explicitly as a VIP channel with early access to sales and drops, and try tools like giveaways and email CTAs to drive sign-ups.

Using Klaviyo for both email and SMS makes it easy to develop the two channels side by side.

“Klaviyo is well-featured and easy to use, even if you’re not an expert,” says Vincke. “And if you become an expert, there’s a lot more power under the hood, and a good ecosystem of vendors and consultants who can help. Klaviyo is great for our brand because we don’t necessarily want a big in-house email team, but we need to get our message out.”

Klaviyo is well-featured and easy to use, even if you’re not an expert—and if you become an expert, there’s a lot more power under the hood, and a good ecosystem of vendors and consultants who can help.