Kulani Kinis scales brand ambassador program by connecting CRM and social marketing
130K
global members of brand ambassador program
5x
growth in brand ambassador program in <4 years
4.8K+
user-generated social posts tagging the brand in past year
Kulani Kinis is a DTC-first swimwear and lifestyle brand founded by husband-and-wife duo Alex Babich and Dani Atkins in 2015. Started in Sydney, the brand has grown into a global phenomenon with a presence in Europe and North America. In fact, the US is their biggest market now, and their bold suits and apparel retail at every Nordstrom in the country. To nurture lasting relationships with customers and creators around the world, Kulani Kinis relies on Klaviyo.
Learn how Kulani Kinis uses Klaviyo Social Marketing to get out of DM debt and manage social collabs at scale
Challenge: Organic social was an “island” in an otherwise integrated stack
Kulani Kinis had a cohesive, integrated marketing stack. They used their long-time B2C CRM, Klaviyo, to orchestrate email, text messaging, and paid media, using Klaviyo’s pre-built integrations with Shopify, Meta Ads, and more.
There was just one outlier.
“Organic social was on an island,” says Jemma Sears, digital marketing manager at Kulani Kinis. “Everything else was integrating nicely, so we could push audiences between platforms.”
Organic social was on an island.
The swimwear brand had amassed a major organic social following—including more than 1 million Instagram followers. But they could only reach their followers through organic posts, which only reach a small fraction of followers, and manual DMs.
This disconnect posed the biggest problem when it came to inbound inquiries about joining their brand ambassador program, called Sun Chasers. Kulani Kinis got hundreds of inbound DMs like this per day—too many to handle manually.
“We were getting bombarded,” recalls founder and managing director Alex Babich. “We actually used to get more DMs about social collabs than we got customer care emails.”
Inevitably, messages fell through the cracks. It was frustrating for the brand and the fans alike. Despite obvious product-market fit, they couldn’t partner with their organic advocates in a scalable way without a technological breakthrough.
"There were a lot of people who just genuinely loved the product and wanted to share it with their followers," Sears recalls. “But we didn’t have an efficient way to amplify that.”
Solution: Klaviyo Social Marketing links Instagram to B2C CRM and beyond
When Kulani Kinis added Klaviyo Social Marketing (previously called Gatsby) to their stack, their Instagram went from an isolated island to an integrated element of their omnichannel marketing strategy.
The impact is most visible in their Sun Chasers program: since adopting Klaviyo Social Marketing, they’ve scaled the program efficiently to more than 130,000 global members. It’s more than tripled in size in less than 4 years.
Brand evangelists now sign up for the Sun Chasers via a Klaviyo form, inputting their social handles as well as an email address and phone number. Klaviyo Social Marketing then pulls their social follower count into their Klaviyo profile, and begins tracking their mentions of Kulani Kinis and other social engagement events alongside browsing and purchasing activity.
Klaviyo Social Marketing allows our omnichannel strategy to fully be omnichannel.
“With Klaviyo Social Marketing, you can marry up all of the data from social and ecommerce,” says Sears.
This allows Kulani Kinis to build automations and omnichannel audiences based on a mix of social advocacy and shopping behaviors—creating a more cohesive, scalable experience for their biggest fans.
"Klaviyo Social Marketing allows our omnichannel strategy to fully be omnichannel,” Sears says. “Now we can give similar messages to our audience on the platforms they're actually on, instead of guessing or hoping they're going to see an email or a social post.”
Strategy: Scaling Sun Chasers operations and impact with an omnichannel approach
How did Klaviyo Social Marketing take the Sun Chasers program from an influx of DMs to a scalable, omnichannel operation? Connecting organic social with the CRM has unlocked scalable, cross-channel tactics for Kulani Kinis, like:
- Special lifecycle offers for frequent social advocates: The Kulani CRM team sends targeted VIP offers and rewards to the Sun Chasers who post most frequently about Kulani Kinis, because data suggests that sustained advocacy over time reads as more persuasive and authentic than one-off posts. Klaviyo makes it easy to create a segment of subscribers who frequently tag the brand account.
- Automated thank-you notes triggered by Instagram tagging: When a Sun Chaser tags Kulani Kinis’ Instagram for the first time, they get an automated thank-you email. To date, it’s gone out to hundreds of brand advocates. Managing that by manually checking notifications and DMing would have been a huge lift.
- Seamless sign-ups via Instagram DMs: Kulani Kinis fans will soon be able to sign up for email, text messages, and even the Sun Chasers program by DMing the brand’s Instagram a keyword. This triggers a Social Auto-reply, powered by Klaviyo Social Marketing. Sears has already seen the impact of Klaviyo auto-replies paired with paid media: she used them to capture hundreds of text sign-ups at a $3.39 cost per acquisition ahead of a product launch.
As the Sun Chasers program becomes an increasingly well-oiled, scalable machine, Sears is excited to use the resulting social proof more strategically across channels with incoming Klaviyo Social Marketing features.
For instance, embedding top-performing social posts in emails with the upcoming social content library feature will make messaging more persuasive for first-time buyers. Sears will also be able to build themed social collections faster once she can query Kulani Kini’s bank of social proof with Klaviyo AI.
“It would be impossible to manage our Sun Chasers program without Klaviyo,” Sears says.
The impact of Klaviyo Social Marketing goes beyond that, too, Babich says: connecting all channels into one cohesive, intelligent system, with the CRM at the center.
"Klaviyo is a really interesting brain that connects to Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, and more,” Babich says. “That creates a network effect and allows us to tell a much more reliable, relatable story across channels. No one besides Klaviyo is doing that well.”
Klaviyo is a really interesting brain that connects to Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, and more. That creates a network effect and allows us to tell a much more reliable, relatable story across channels. No one besides Klaviyo is doing that well.”
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