Background
Vinyl Moon is an indie music subscription — a curated vinyl/CD discovery box for fans of music you can't get anywhere else. Brandon, the founder, was running the business solo after his operations lead Brianna departed. Newsletter list was around 8,000 active members (suppressed down from a 200K legacy list). Low seven-figure ARR, with a target of 3,000 active members.
For most of the year, ads were "just staying steady, steady, steady." Brandon had hired help in two places — neither was working.
The problem
Two outside vendors were on the way out:
- A generalist ad agency (contract ending) — efficient at media buying but brand-misaligned. Vinyl Moon is a creative-storytelling brand; the agency ran it like a generic DTC account.
- A fractional CMO — slow, limited capability, not actually setting strategy.
On top of that, email was broken. Shopify's native email was hiding attribution data, and there was no way to send transactional updates to anyone who had unsubscribed from marketing — including a record-delay notice. Brandon had a past bad experience with Klaviyo (an unmanaged list inflated by spam bots) and didn't want to migrate unless someone was actually managing it.
His exact words on the first call: "I wish I had somebody who could do something with all this data and all these insights."
What we did
Klaviyo migration with brand-voice AI. We rebuilt the email program in Klaviyo with AI-generated campaigns that pulled brand voice directly from Vinyl Moon's website and existing campaigns. Setup took 30 minutes; the migration ran in the background while the old agency was still live, then we cut over.
No-discount retention model. Brandon was firm: no discounts on club memberships. We honored it by replacing discount logic with:
- Gift-with-purchase on clearance/overstock items (used in lieu of cash discounts)
- A quarterly gift card to drive store purchases without touching membership pricing
- Member-exclusive 10-item rotation — each month, members can add one of ten items free to their box
Cadence framework.
- 30-day engaged: general announcements + new product launches
- 60+ day engaged: lapsed re-engagement
- 180+ day non-purchasers: nurture only
Max once weekly. No more than 1-2 product launches per month for non-Vinyl Moon records.
Content + community. Behind-the-scenes content opportunities surfaced in audit: visual artist collaboration process, die-cut manufacturing samples, monthly member events via video calls. Set up Slack Connect with Brandon for fast turnaround.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Net new subscribers | Flat | +150/mo |
| Customer acquisition cost | Baseline | ~45% lower |
Ads stopped being flat. The retention work and the email infrastructure compounded — same baseline traffic, dramatically better economics on every subscriber acquired.
In their words
"I wish I had somebody who could do something with all this data and all these insights." — Brandon, founder, Vinyl Moon