Solo Stove uses Klaviyo to personalize sends and increase revenue per subscriber 3.5x

Solo Stove makes portable, stainless-steel heating equipment, from wood-burning stoves to fire pits. Founded in 2011, this Dallas-area business has grown steadily every year since its start—and in 2019, co-founders (and brothers) Jeff and Spencer Jan were finalists for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Southwest.

How Solo Stove uses Klaviyo to drive 20% of its revenue

Challenge

John Merris joined Solo Stove as president and CEO to scale the business, especially the owned ecommerce store.

But he faced a technical roadblock: the company’s marketing automation platform.

• It was too outdated to send personalized marketing emails.
• It couldn’t even send back-in-stock notifications.

To build stronger relationships with customers and deprioritize Amazon sales, the company needed to upgrade.

We were looking for something more modern and sophisticated in terms of helping us leverage our real-time SKU-level data.

“A lot of the traditional email platforms have been around since the late ‘90s or early 2000s, but we wanted something that wasn’t so legacy,” says John Merris, CEO and president, Solo Stove. “We were looking for something more modern and sophisticated in terms of helping us leverage our real-time SKU-level data.” 

Solution

Klaviyo stood out to the Solo Stove team as a scalable option that was sophisticated enough to evolve with the company’s needs, but easy enough to use on Day 1. Or, more accurately, Hour 1. 

Connecting their Klaviyo account with their BigCommerce store took less than an hour—and voila, the team could build automated, purchase-triggered email flows. 

Strategy

Now, Solo Stove’s team can create a personalized, branded experience for each shopper in their online store that feels like a “one-to-one conversation,” as Merris put it.

Klaviyo has empowered Solo Stove to roll out custom email capture pop-ups and hyper-segmented cross-selling sends. After purchase, Solo Stove customers now get an email recommending products frequently bought with their items. 

Klaviyo lets us communicate at a more personal level with our customers so we speak to them as individuals versus communicating with the masses.

The percentage of Solo Stove revenue coming from Amazon is shrinking already. The team actively drives traffic to the company store now—they’re that confident in the customer experience they built with Klaviyo.

“We can use Klaviyo to stay in touch with our customers and give them valuable information and content at the right time to keep them engaged,” says Merris. “Klaviyo lets us communicate at a more personal level with our customers so we speak to them as individuals versus communicating with the masses.”