Paul Smith uses Klaviyo to better fit their B2C and B2B needs

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If you want luxury clothing from a British icon, you shop at Paul Smith. Whether you’re sporting their signature stripes or posing for a selfie outside their pink store in Los Angeles, you know you’re part of a distinct and instantly identifiable retailer. Small wonder that what began as a 3×3 metre shop in 1970 has become 130 stores and counting in over 60 countries.

Learn how Paul Smith uses Klaviyo integrations to future proof their email and SMS marketing 

Challenge

Paul Smith had been using DotDigital for over 10 years. But as the brand grew their B2B and B2C offerings, their website and marketing functionality was beginning to feel the strain. 

Hannah Bennett, who has been Paul Smith’s head of digital since 2020, saw that the development team were spending their energy on maintenance, rather than developing new features for customers.

“During sales, our marketing team would have to stagger our emails to prevent the site crashing—and then the site would go down anyway,” Bennett says. 

Despite not having a dedicated B2B department, more of Paul Smith’s revenue comes from selling to traditional showrooms, rather than individual consumers. “We don’t have a dedicated B2B department. We needed our site to give our wholesale sales team a platform to quickly view and place orders to set up the appropriate season.”

“We needed smarter, easy-to-use integrations, to merge transactional campaign emails into one, and put the foundations in place for SMS in 2025,” Bennett adds.

In September 2023, Black Friday was looming, and the team had never done a marketing replatform. But it was time to modernise.

Solution

To make this happen, Paul Smith switched from DotDigital to Klaviyo and moved their website to Klaviyo integration Centra—a composable platform that became their new ecommerce store. This combination gave Paul Smith a single place of ownership for transaction, triggered, and campaign emails which were previously disconnected.

They also took on Klaviyo tech partner, Klevu, to power their abandoned search.

“We had a fantastic onboarding experience redesigning and moving our email templates into Klaviyo, and we didn’t have to railroad the project to create new templates. The marketing team is really enjoying the simplicity of building flows,” says Bennett.

This empowered the team to not only take more autonomy over their marketing output, but also support the brand’s B2B division more effectively and with less effort. With Klaviyo and Centra working in concert, Paul Smith’s wholesale customers can purchase through their digital showroom, while sharing data to inform more targeted buying experiences for future purchases. 

Strategy

In the lead-up to Black Friday, the marketing team used Klaviyo to build their subscriber lists with tools including organic social media and pop-ups. Paul Smith also collaborates with other brands on jointly-created products to entice customers with similar shopping tastes.

“We used to treat Black Friday as an isolated event,” Bennett explains. “Now, we’re doing more to keep that subscriber base engaged over a longer timeframe.” In total, Paul Smith has created 33 active flows since moving to Klaviyo, including welcome, re-engagement, and sunset journeys.

With website functionality now powered by Centra and email in Klaviyo, Paul Smith’s digital team is free to spend more time improving the customer experience.

“We can spend more time figuring out how to elevate the transactional journey,” Bennett explains. “We’re experimenting more with imagery on those more triggered emails from an on-site point of view.” 

“Klaviyo has opened our eyes to how we can get more brand storytelling into our content,” adds Bennett. “We’re a big gifting brand with a huge range, so we’re always trying to educate the customer on the breadth of product we have and how we can fit in to their lifestyle.”

Paul Smith are also planning to update their sites’ UIs to better reflect their customers. Continuing with the Klevu and Klaviyo integration for on-site personalisation will be the benchmark for how they measure success as they expand in the US, Europe, and Asia.

“Email has become one of our most important marketing channels. There’s pressure to perform, but the ease of use and performance from Centra and Klaviyo means we don’t worry about segmentation and execution,” says Bennett.