Quick question.
What was your biggest lesson from 2024?
Actually, two questions. And neither of them is “quick.”
What’s your biggest strategy for 2025?
Those are the all-consuming topics we’ll tackle throughout January — straight from each of the Operators’ brands + a few of our (8 and 9-figure) friends.
Today …
🤓 Connor Rolain on mastering upsells
📅 Bums & Roses CMO on 2024 → 2025
🗞️ 5 biggest headlines in consumer news
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Connor Rolain
HexClad, Head of Growth
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Turn Every Sale into Profit With Upsell Academy
You know the power of upselling — higher AOV, better margins, and happier customers. But it’s not just about offering an upsell.
It’s about offering:
- The right upsell
- At the right time
- With the right strategy
That’s why Aftersell created Upsell Academy. To help you boost AOV by up to 35% + get a 10.56% average upsell rate.
In Upsell Academy, you’ll learn how …
🎓 An alcohol alternative brand is driving nearly $1M in incremental revenue using post-purchase upselling
💡 To A/B test different product recommendations, upsell formats, and pricing strategies to generate the highest conversions possible
🚀 To create a seamless, branded checkout and tackle common abandonment issues
The beginning of the year is a perfect time to learn something new and polish up your 2025 plans.
Use Upsell Academy to do just that!
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Bryant Jaquez
CMO, Bums & Roses
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Bryant is the CMO at Bums & Rose — the trendsetting children and newborn apparel brand. Previously, he led marketing at Caden Lane and The Adventure Challenge. He’s held several roles, including consultant, contractor, and CEO.
What is your biggest lesson from 2024? And what’s your biggest strategy for 2025?
2024: Lesson ← Evergreen
Evergreen products are non-seasonal, always-on, unseen, and unstoppable. I’ve come to believe they’re one of the most underrated strategies in ecommerce.
Having an evergreen or hero product makes everything you need to accomplish easier and more likely to succeed.
It’s the ecosystem equivalent of living in a city with clean air.
You can survive without it. If you’ve never had it, you probably didn’t notice. But once you’re used to it — you can’t go back.
At one point in my career, I led a women’s apparel company through bankruptcy. One of our biggest challenges was dealing with the unforgiving seasonality of women’s apparel.
It didn’t have a single evergreen SKU.
That meant we’d put effort into launching products and building winning funnels. Then, those products would go out of stock.
Once a seasonal product sells out, you have to start all over again. Running a business without an evergreen bestseller creates instability in every channel — you should avoid it.
Conversely, some of the best-performing ads at Caden Lane have been running for years. If you leave DTC and look at Fortune 500 companies, you’ll notice brands like Geico keep winning ads running for decades.
Let me clarify what I mean by “evergreen product” …
- They never go out of season or out-of-stock; they’re always in demand — e.g., plain white tees.
- They acquire customers profitably, they work in ads + AOV is high enough to counter meta-inflation.
- They target a large TAM — think, deodorant. Every smelly armpit in the world is a potential customer.
They’re also adaptable and can be iterated upon.
With a base of evergreen products, you can release seasonal iterations to unlock new buying opportunities. It’s the Starbucks PSL approach to merchandising.
If you’re a marketer or operator working at a high-SKU DTC brand, this advice is for you.
Focus 80% of your efforts on building funnels around evergreen products. In marketing, success comes from taking enough swings at bat — focusing most of those swings on a single product guarantees a higher success rate.
Ads
Find 3–5 winning formats for evergreen products and spend the year producing iterations on those formats.
You’ll notice most of your favorite nine-figure brands have had similar formats running in their ad accounts for years. Once you find a winning ad, do whatever you can to keep it running forever.
Work closely with the product and ops team to manage backorders or pre-orders. OOS SKUs are a conversion killer.
Here’s a great non-DTC example. David Hermann pointed out an ad that’s been running every Christmas since 1990:
Influencers
Prioritize evergreen products with influencers.
At one company, we sent products to 100 influencers a week, and a high percentage of those resulted in ad-usable UGC.
I’d rather test 100 videos of one product than one UGC for 100 different products. The math of the first approach guarantees a winning ad — while the second could fail 100/100 times.
Here’s a few examples from Q4 …
Email & SMS
In 2025, CRM is a volume game — the more you send, the more you earn. High-SKU brands should feature seasonal drops in campaigns but build flows around evergreen products.
Avoid over-messaging VIPs by targeting newly subscribed profiles more frequently. Once a profile becomes a customer, reduce SMS frequency.
Merchandising
Feature evergreen products on your homepage, towards the top of collections, in upsell funnels, and your navigation.
I’d bet my snack stash that Cartier(.)com will feature its Love Bracelet, Nail Bracelet, and a Cartier Tank on its homepage 365 days a year. Go check ↓
Why? Because evergreen works.
Planning
Evergreen thinking should shape your annual marketing plan. Retail calendars, product drops, sales events, and activations should repeat year after year.
Doing so makes it easy to benchmark YoY performance. In fact, you could plan the lion’s share of Black Friday 2025 now.
How? Move everything that worked forward, discard what didn’t, and leave space for things you learn over the next nine months. Do the same for each month of the year.
2025: Strategy → Omni-Upsells
Upsells are the quiet MVP of ecommerce.
Scroll through the chatter on X, and you’ll see brands boasting 7–8 figures in post-purchase revenue. I’ve seen it firsthand — one of my post-purchase funnels is pulling a solid 10% take rate.
We do this onsite with Aftersell.
First, giving customers a variety of immediate post-purchase offers on specific products or mystery bundles.
Second, giving them a general though still limited-time discount on the confirmation page. But here’s the catch …
Shopify’s payment processor restrictions mean not everyone will see the offer. The solution?
Make your post-purchase upsell omnichannel, start with SMS — then, move to direct mail.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on the SMS flow because it’s the easiest to implement. I use One Text for my SMS automations, but you can replicate a similar strategy on other platforms.
Here’s how …
- Enable your order confirmation flow
- Add an AI product recommendation
- Text buyers a limited-time discount
- Always include “No Added Shipping”
- Enable reply-to-buy — if possible
This simple, one-text confirmation will boost your post-purchase funnel’s conversion rate.
Test for incremental gains.
Run a three-way split test: one holdout cohort gets no upsell, and the other two get different offers. Finally, make sure your segments exclude shoppers who already took a post-purchase offer on your dotcom.
That’s it. My account rep claims about ⅓ of shoppers accept offers like this. PP funnels work in SMS, native apps, email, and direct mail, each channel unlocking a slightly higher AOV.
Each is fairly simple and straightforward.
“[TikTok] Shops: The Acceleration We’ve Been Waiting For” with Paul from BK Beauty
How Product Positioning & Post-Purchase Upsells Supercharge CRO: Shane Rostad
Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest consumer-news headlines.
1. USANA Health Sciences Acquires Hiya Health: Business Wire
USANA Health Sciences, a multi-level marketing firm and a manufacturer of nutritional supplements, has acquired a majority stake in Hiya Health for $205M in cash. Founded in 2020 by Darren Litt and Adam Gillman, Hiya Health is a fast-growing purveyor of children’s health & wellness products. The company posted LTM net sales of $103M and net income of $19M.
2. Jaimee Lupton Launches DAISE Beauty: LinkedIn
Jaimee Lupton is best known as the co-founder of MONDAY Haircare, a masstige haircare brand that launched in 2018 and hit $100M in revenue by 2022. Now, the Kiwi entrepreneur has partnered with ZURU Edge to launch DAISE Beauty, a fragrance and body-care brand that just debuted at Ulta Beauty. Its clever packaging will likely lead to a lot of organic UGC.
3. Kim Kardashian Steps Away From PE Firm: Hypebeast
Kim Kardashian is no longer a Managing Partner at SKKY Partners, the consumer private equity firm she co-founded in 2022 with Carlyle alum Jay Sammons.
The firm set out to raise $1B but only secured $121M and completed just one deal (TRUFF in late 2023).
4. L’Oréal Acquires Dr. G: Cosmetics Design Europe
French beauty giant L’Oréal has acquired Dr. G, one of the top-selling skincare brands in South Korea. Dermatologist Dr. Gun Young Ahn launched the Seoul-based skincare brand in 2003. L’Oréal has made a wide variety of acquisitions lately, including Gjosa, Lactobio, 3CE, and Aesop for $2.5B.
5. Amanda Kloots & The Center Unveil Supplement Brand: Instagram
Fitness entrepreneur Amanda Kloots has joined forces with The Center to launch Proper, a line of superfood drink mixes that solve common problems like bloating and lethargy. Proper will officially debut on Tuesday, January 7th. The Center is the beauty incubator behind Naturium, which exited to E.l.f. Beauty in 2023 for $355M.
Tongue-in-cheek introductions aside …
I really am curious about your biggest lessons looking back + biggest strategies moving forward.
In fact, a number of you wrote back to London Spliker’s 2024 into 2025 reflection: 5 Data Lies & 1 Truth.
Both with questions and asking if you could contribute.
Want to share your insights?
As long as you’re up for the depth London and (now) Bryant brought … let me know by writing back!
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓 Executive Editor
PS: Special thanks to Aftersell for sponsoring this week’s newsletter and helping us bring you the best freaking ecommerce content in the world.