Wavy launched its second styling product on owned channels alone, with paid ads held back until day four. We built the waitlist, the early-access day, the launch sends and the education that followed. The early-access email converted 3.5% of everyone who received it, early-access day produced 8x the store’s usual daily email orders, the comb sold out in two and a half days, and the brand beat its week-one and week-two targets without spending a pound on SMS.
Facts
Client: Wavy
Industry: Hair care (DTC, UK)
Partners: Skio
ESP: Klaviyo
Focus area: Product launch on owned channels
Results
- 8x the daily email orders on early-access day and 6x on launch day, against the usual daily baseline
- 3.5% of the early-access list bought from one email, at £1.06 per recipient, 14x the public launch send
- +311% campaign revenue in the launch fortnight against the fortnight before, with SMS held in reserve
- Sold out the pomade comb in about two and a half days, ahead of the week-one and week-two targets
Client Insights
Wavy makes styling products for wavy and curly hair, built for men and now sold to everyone with texture. The hero product is the Everyday Curl Crème. The pomade is the second styling product: more hold, a wetter, slicked-back finish, aimed at the people the crème’s hold was never quite enough for. It launched on September 4, 2026, at the same price as the crème, so there’s no reason to trade down.
We run Wavy’s lifecycle program: email, the Skio subscription experience, and SMS when a send earns it. The founders own the product, the offer and the social channels. The launch plan was theirs. Turning it into emails that sold, that’s ours.
The Challenge
A second product in a one-product brand has a problem the first one didn’t have: it can eat the first one. If the pomade is sold as a better crème, crème customers switch, nobody’s routine grows and the launch nets out to zero. So every email had to sell a different need, not a better product, and the people most likely to switch (active crème subscribers) had to hear that first. It isn’t a subtle problem, and it’s an easy one to walk into.
The second constraint was the plan itself. The brand chose to launch on owned channels only for the first three days, so it could read the organic demand before paying for a single order. That put the whole first-week number on email, a list that hadn’t been asked to carry a launch by itself before.
And there was a benchmark. The co-wash, launched the previous winter to everyone with curly hair, had done its numbers with a product that suits every customer. The pomade doesn’t.
Our Process
1. Build the list before the product exists
Three weeks out we opened a waitlist and pointed everything at it: a landing page, the main pop-up’s success screen, an exit-intent pop-up and two teaser emails that named the need (“you asked for more hold”) without naming the product. We didn’t use the word pomade until August 31, when a founder-led email told the story of making it. The waitlist closed half again as big as the co-wash’s had been.
2. One day early for the people who earned it
On September 3 the waitlist and the two top loyalty tiers got the pomade a day before anyone else, with free shipping for 24 hours as the perk for being early. The next morning the public launch went to the full list, with the offer made explicit the moment orders opened, one of the lessons we’d carried over from the co-wash launch.
3. A different message for every kind of customer
The launch wasn’t one email. Lapsed customers and canceled subscribers heard “the crème didn’t work for your style? Try the pomade”. Active crème customers were shown how one founder uses the pomade and the other uses the crème, so the pomade became an addition to a routine rather than a replacement for it. Leads who’d never bought were told the brand now had two styling products and shown which one was for them. Hair type, captured at the pop-up and nudged out of existing subscribers by a campaign in August, decided who saw which version.
4. Education, then the routine
Four days after launch, “Crème, Pomade, or both?” set out the two jobs the two products do, by hair type. “How To: Pomade” followed, in one version for buyers and one for the wider list, built from what the founders had learned seeding the product with barbers: how much to use, damp or dry hair, how to fix a finish that came out shinier than you’d wanted. Then the full wavy-hair routine, pomade and comb included. In the flows, the post-purchase sequence gained pomade education and a replenishment touch at six weeks, and the welcome flow now routes new subscribers to the product their hair type needs.
5. Hold the SMS
The plan had a launch SMS ready. By the first review the brand was ahead of its week-one and week-two sales targets on email alone, so we held it, and held it again, for a payday send with a reason to exist. Spending on a channel to beat a target you’ve already beaten is how launch costs quietly double.
The Results
Read from Klaviyo on October 8, 2026. The launch fortnight is September 3 to 16, compared with the 14 days before it.
| Metric | Launch fortnight vs. the fortnight before |
|---|---|
| Campaign revenue (email) | +311% |
| Campaign orders | +273% |
| Klaviyo-attributed revenue, all channels | +82% |
On September 3, early-access day, email-attributed orders ran at 8x the daily average of the nine days before, and on launch day, September 4, at 6x. The early-access email converted 3.5% of the people who received it and made £1.06 per recipient, about 14 times what the public send made per person the next day. That’s what earned early access is worth.
The launch campaigns ran from the first teaser on August 22 to the how-to on September 10, with the kit spotlight at the end of the month adding to the total. The comb that shipped with the pomade sold out in about two and a half days.
All of that with no paid support until day four and the SMS still in reserve. Email carried the launch.
Where To From Here?
The six-week replenishment trigger was set from the crème’s usage data. Three months after launch we review the pomade’s actual reorder window and we’ll move it. The cancellation flow is being rebuilt around what the subscriber survey found, with one-tap deferral built into the billing reminder, and the launch kits roll into the brand’s Black Friday plan with the same rule that ran this launch: a different message for every kind of customer, and no channel spent on a target that’s already been hit.
