If you’ve been on social media over the past year or so, you’ve probably stumbled across True Classic, the rapidly growing D2C t-shirt company that’s gone viral.
Everyone talks about their ads, but very few folks talk about their lifecycle program, so I intentionally abandoned cart at checkout to enroll myself in their win-back program. Over the next month and a half, I tracked every SMS and email send and spent 40+ hours breaking down their strategy.
Why win-backs are so important
True Classic has around 4M customers as of 2025, and they spend millions on paid acquisition. Let’s just say 30% of all customers abandon their cart and don’t purchase. That’s 1.2M customers each month that fail to convert.
If True Classic “wins back” just 10% of them, that’s roughly 120,000 in additional orders, and at a conservative $68 AOV, that’s $8.2M in recovered revenue (pretty easy to understand why email and SMS are so important 🤔).
Key takeaways
If you don’t have time to check out the board, here are the most interesting key takeaways
- The most used CTA is “shop”
- There are only 3 email categories: (1) Social proof, (2) offer, (3) Product showcase
- True Classic relies heavily on their product catalog & promotional offers to drive action.
- The first “abandon cart” reminder email wasn’t sent until June 6th
- Every email begins with a large lifestyle image at the top showcasing the product.
- Email indexes toward product-focused messaging, while SMS leans heavier toward offers
The outlier insight
There was one interesting trend I noticed that caught me by surprise. The first true abandon cart email didn’t come until email 25, nearly 8 weeks after I abandoned cart. Given most brands operate on a much smaller time horizon for sending checkout reminders, I’m genuinely curious why this might be… My hunch is that it has something to do with their product catalog or possibly some special insights internally.
Closing thoughts
The next breakdown I’m going to be doing is Starbucks, so if you don't want to miss it, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Also, if there is a specific brand you want to see broken down or someone in the lifecycle community you want featured, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to more deep dives together.
