Stride Consumer Partners’ PortCos use Klaviyo B2C CRM as scalable “forever platform”
Stride Consumer Partners is a private equity firm that partners with talented and dynamic founders, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to build the next generation of great consumer brands. Founded in 2019 by a passionate group of investor-operators, they provide their portfolio companies with growth equity and operating support—which can range from category and consumer research to strategic support and tech partnerships.
Stride’s challenge: picking a go-to CRM for a diverse portfolio
Stride Consumer Partners works with brands at a variety of stages, but all are in growth mode. Most CRM software options lack the speed and agility necessary to support rapid growth within small teams.
CRM SaaS products built for enterprise can slow down earlier-stage companies. “Enterprise systems are built developer-first, and you often incur significant costs for development support to go in and build things,” explains David Retter, operating partner at Stride. “These systems aren’t things a marketer can easily use.”
Enterprise systems are built developer-first, and you often incur significant costs for development support to go in and build things. These systems aren’t things a marketer can easily use.
Even executing messaging automations and targeted campaigns requires developer support.
That can bog down smaller companies in terms of efficiencies and total cost of ownership: they have to pay for the software and the developers to get emails to market.
Meanwhile, “challenger” CRM software for smaller brands poses usability issues—and often can’t scale to enterprise level. For a fast-growing business, that means success will involve a second CRM migration.
Neither option makes sense for Stride’s portfolio companies. They need the agility to grow and collaborate with each other in a rapidly-changing macroenvironment.
Enter Klaviyo, a “forever platform” for PortCos of all sizes
Klaviyo stood out to Stride as different—a just-right CRM option for their whole portfolio.
It’s built marketer-first, rather than developer-first, so marketers can build automations and segments autonomously and efficiently. And it’s intuitive and scalable enough to be a fast-growth brand’s “forever platform,” Retter says.
“Klaviyo has all of the capabilities that a brand will need 2 years from now, 3 years from now, a hundred million in annual revenue from now,” Retter adds. “A lot of work has been done on the security side, which is really important as you get bigger, and Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) allows you to really bring together that complete view of the customer.”
Klaviyo has all of the capabilities that a brand will need 2 years from now, 3 years from now, a hundred million in annual revenue from now. A lot of work has been done on the security side, which is really important as you get bigger, and Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) allows you to really bring together that complete view of the customer.
All of Stride’s current portfolio companies use Klaviyo, which fosters collaboration across the portfolio.
“We’re able to speak the same language when we’re talking about CRM strategy,” Retter says. “Having all our brands on Klaviyo means they can share insights and move rapidly to iterate and translate a good idea from one company to others in the portfolio.”
To ensure Stride’s portfolio companies make the most of Klaviyo B2C CRM’s always-expanding feature set, Stride doubled down on the platform, and worked with Klaviyo to build a mutually beneficial partnership.
Now, Retter and his team can reach out to in-house contacts at Klaviyo for platform best practices, usage guidance for portfolio companies, and timely updates on new releases.
“Getting not only internal but category and competitive insights from Klaviyo has been really awesome,” Retter says. “It’s helped us understand what’s happening outside our echo chamber—where we’re ahead of schedule across our portfolio, and where we have opportunities to improve.”
How 3 Stride PortCos—including Patrick Ta Beauty—use Klaviyo today
Each Stride brand uses Klaviyo in a slightly different way. Retter walked us through use cases from 3 different portfolio companies—and why each one is valuable.
1. Patrick Ta Beauty uses Klaviyo to power BFCM growth
Patrick Ta Beauty used Klaviyo to help support astronomical YoY growth during BFCM 2024—175% ecommerce revenue growth, and 8x growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue.
The beauty brand worked with their agency, Inbox Stars, to use Klaviyo tools like:
- Web forms to capture high-intent email and SMS sign-ups in the months before BFCM, with subscribe CTAs highlighting loyalty perks and early access to the holiday sale
- Smart Send Time to optimize the timing of their email and SMS campaigns during the holiday rush
- Segmentation to exclude people who had bought in the last 7 days from holiday email and SMS sends, minimizing redundancy and unsubscribes
“Patrick Ta is a great example of a brand using Klaviyo to amplify a promotional strategy into the CRM ecosystem, making sure they’re getting high deliverability and sending the right messages at the right time,” Retter says.
2. Truewerk uses Klaviyo automations to support repeat purchases
Workwear retailer Truewerk has leaned into Klaviyo flows to encourage more repeat purchases and more diverse orders.
Truewerk’s pants are the most common first purchase for the brand’s customers. And the most common second and third purchases.
But pants only make up about 30% of the company’s catalog—and the team wanted to encourage customers to branch out.
So Truewerk started building personalized product recommendations into their post-purchase flows, using Klaviyo features like dynamic content blocks to highlight the products most relevant to a customer’s browsing and search history.
Now, Retter says, they’re driving more second orders than ever. In 2024, Truewerk saw:
- 25% YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue
- 92% YoY growth in revenue from flows
- 74% YoY growth in unique conversions from flows
Retter credits the ease of setting up, launching, and iterating on Klaviyo flows for a lot of that success.
“Klaviyo is the most intuitive platform I’ve ever used for developing flows and pulling content into emails dynamically,” Retter says. “If someone didn’t open an automated email, we can trigger an SMS. If they didn’t purchase after a whole flow, we can put them in a retargeting pool and send that back out to Facebook to advertise to them. There are so many incredible things we can do.”
Klaviyo is the most intuitive platform I’ve ever used for developing flows and pulling content into emails dynamically. If someone didn’t open an automated email, we can trigger an SMS. If they didn’t purchase after a whole flow, we can put them in a retargeting pool and send that back out to Facebook to advertise to them.
3. Odele turns quiz data into relevant messaging with Klaviyo
Another Stride portfolio company, clean haircare brand Odele, uses Klaviyo to store and activate customer data from their hair quiz.
Based on customers’ responses to questions about their hair texture and goals, Odele pulls 10+ custom properties into their Klaviyo customer profiles using the Octane AI integration.
They use that data not only to trigger a flow based on quiz completion, but throughout the customer lifecycle to create segments and target campaigns, so customers only see relevant products.
If Odele launches a new product for curly hair, for example, they’ll exclude customers with straight hair from launch promotions.
“Odele makes sure that after the consumer takes the quiz and answers these questions, they get marketing messages that are incredibly relevant to their needs,” Retter says. “That is the power of integrating quizzes with Klaviyo—the quiz data can flow through all of what Odele does.”
Looking ahead: Klaviyo equips Stride PortCos for a volatile economy
Stride’s partnership with Klaviyo is already rewarding—and in the evolving ecommerce space, with tariffs looming, Retter sees future benefits to it, too.
Already, “COVID brought every business that didn’t do ecommerce into the online ecosystem,” Reter recalls.
And paid media targeting is losing efficacy, between iOS updates and upcoming browser-level cookie changes.
“Every single brand in the world right now is trying to figure out how they can get more money out of existing customers, because getting new people to buy for the first time is incredibly expensive,” Retter says.
Klaviyo and its constant innovation acts as a moat for Stride and its portfolio companies. Personalizing the CRM experience can reduce customer acquisition costs—not just around first purchases, but also subsequent purchases, Retter notes, with tools like Advanced KDP (AKDP), an enterprise-ready CDP.
“The more you can own your data, the less the reverberations of all these things happening across the digital ether impact your business,” Retter says. “AKDP is super right for us as we think about what customer data is going to mean to brands going forward. Taking control of our first-party data, and using Klaviyo as our partner to hold it, augment it, and leverage it to orchestrate across all of our touchpoints, is incredibly valuable.”
AKDP is super right for us as we think about what customer data is going to mean to brands going forward. Taking control of our first-party data, and using Klaviyo as our partner to hold it, augment it, and leverage it to orchestrate across all of our touchpoints, is incredibly valuable.