📈 The CRM Shift: Why We’re Rebuilding How We Talk to Customers

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Let’s be real: scaling a DTC brand used to be simpler.

If you had product-market fit and could run a killer Meta funnel with a strong offer, you could brute-force your way to 8 figures.

That’s how we grew Obvi in the early days. We got really good at acquisition. Great ads, smooth funnels, and aggressive testing took us a long way.

But now we fear that old growth engine isn’t enough.

CAC is up. Buyers are spread across TikTok, Amazon, retail shelves, email, SMS, and even ChatGPT. Attribution is fuzzy. Margins are tighter. 

That’s we think the future of DTC growth will be defined by how well you manage customer relationships across channels. So we’re building our systems backward from that.

Today’s newsletter is all about the CRM shift. Not as a tool, but as a mindset.

On the Menu:

⏰ Obvi’s Wake-Up Call
🧭 Mapping The New Customer Maze
🪚 How We're Rebuilding Our Customer Experience Infrastructure

Note: this newsletter was made in collaboration with Klaviyo and their Beginner’s Guide to B2C CRM.

It’s a clear breakdown on how customer systems need to evolve to match the new buyer journey.

👉 Check out the full guide here

We crossed $100M in lifetime sales, with $40M in 2024. But the view of our customers was still obscure, fractured, and difficult to piece together. 

Because of that, everyone on the team had a different view of the customer. That increased the risk of:

We were great at marketing. But managing relationships across all of our different cohorts at scale was becoming impossible. 

So we started digging. 

What signals were we missing? What should we have known (and acted on) earlier?

That’s when it became clear: our stack wasn’t merely inefficient. It was silently costing us money, retention, and trust.

And we’re not alone:

Customer relationship management isn’t a nice-to-have feature for us at this stage. It’s becoming a survival tool.

One mindset shift we’ve had to make → 

Stop thinking of acquisition and retention as separate functions. They’re gradients of the same customer journey.

If we only optimize for CAC and front-end conversion, we’ll miss the bigger picture. 

What we’re starting to ask now:

Retention starts before the first purchase. But to influence that, we need more than ROAS and contribution margin. We need visibility into lifecycle value, starting from the first click. 

Here’s what DTC looked like a few years ago:

Meta ad → Click to site → Add to cart → Abandon → Abcart flow → Purchase → Thank-you email

Now?

It’s not really a funnel anymore. It’s more like a maze. But it could be a flywheel.

Trying to manage all of this with a duct-taped series of tools and a bloated tech stack is a major challenge for brands these days. 

That included us until recently.

We realized scalable personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s what separates the winners from the discount addicts.

And 1:1 personalization doesn’t work without a clean, connected view of the customer. Not just what they bought, but:

When you see all of that in one place, you stop guessing. You start really marketing.

If you’re serious about turning one-time buyers into lifelong customers
→ start here

We didn’t start with a grand replatforming plan. We started with pain points.

Here are a few key changes we’ve been making:

1. Using AI-powered analytics to market smarter
Instead of building flows and hoping they resonate, we’re starting to use AI to help us test message variants, match them to the right channels, and estimate next purchase timing based on predicted behavior.

It’s helping us:

This lines up with a key theme in Klaviyo’s B2C CRM guide: your data isn’t just for sending emails, it’s for understanding your customers, tailoring your messaging, and future-proofing relationships.

2. Smarter segmentation

We moved beyond basic filters and built behavioral profiles, including:

Flows are no longer one-size-fits-all. They match intent, timing, and value.

Klaviyo has helped us reframe this. Instead of static segments, we’re now thinking in terms of evolving behaviors that reflect real purchase cycles and needs. They match intent, timing, and value.

3. Behavior-based outreach

We looked at reorder behavior by SKU. If most collagen buyers reorder at 26 days, we suppress reminders until day 27+ to avoid being annoying. 

Instead of guessing, we:

4. Embracing a unified customer view

This is our North Star: one profile that shows the full picture. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re making progress toward a shared dashboard that shows:

Klaviyo’s beginner’s guide helped clarify what this can unlock: better timing, smarter offers, stronger relationships.

🧠 If we were building a CRM strategy from scratch today, we’d start with:

When everyone on the team sees the same customer context across the entire customer journey, you make better decisions and market smarter.

🔹 Klaviyo — More than email/SMS. We’re exploring their CDP and AI flows for send-time optimization, churn risk suppression, and behavior-based journeys. Learn more here →

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