Glossier uses NevTan Engage to grow flow revenue by 55% and build a community-first retention engine

Glossier is a New York-based direct-to-consumer beauty brand that built its identity around community, skin-first philosophy, and a deeply loyal customer base. What began as a beauty blog — Into The Gloss — evolved into one of the most recognised skincare and makeup brands of the last decade, with a product range spanning cleansers, moisturisers, serums, and cosmetics. Glossier sells primarily through its own website and flagship stores, giving it full ownership of the customer relationship — and full responsibility for keeping that relationship active. As the brand scaled and its product catalogue grew, the challenge shifted from acquisition to retention: how to keep existing customers engaged, buying across more categories, and bringing their friends along.

Learn how Glossier used NevTan Engage to turn one-time buyers into loyal, high-frequency customers

Glossier's marketing team had always excelled at brand storytelling, but their automated flows had not kept pace with the brand's growth. Post-purchase sequences were generic, replenishment reminders were not timed to actual product usage cycles, and the team had no way to surface complementary products to buyers based on what they had already purchased. With a catalogue spanning skincare routines, makeup, and body care, the personalisation opportunity was enormous — but the tooling to act on it was not in place.

Challenge

Glossier's customer lifetime value was highly dependent on getting buyers to make a second and third purchase — the data consistently showed that customers who purchased across two or more product categories had dramatically higher retention rates than single-category buyers. But the team had no automated way to nudge single-category purchasers toward complementary products at the right moment.

Replenishment flows existed but were timed to a fixed 30-day window regardless of product type — meaning serums (which run out in 4–6 weeks) and lip balms (which last 2–3 months) were being followed up on the same schedule, resulting in either early or missed replenishment prompts. Engagement was also declining among customers who had been on the list for more than 12 months, with no re-engagement strategy in place.

Strategy

Glossier implemented NevTan Engage to rebuild its post-purchase automation from scratch. Using NevTan's advanced segmentation, the team created product-category-aware flows that identified what a customer had purchased and automatically queued up complementary product recommendations aligned with their skin type and routine stage.

Replenishment flows were restructured using product-specific timing logic — serums triggered at 35 days, moisturisers at 50 days, lip balms at 75 days — dramatically improving the relevance of each outreach. For long-inactive customers (12+ months with no purchase), a multi-step re-engagement sequence was launched across email and push, featuring new launches and a personalised "what's new for your routine" message block. SMS was layered in for high-LTV customers to announce limited drops and early access events.

Solution

With NevTan Engage coordinating email, push, and SMS in a single platform, Glossier's retention team could manage the full customer lifecycle without juggling multiple tools. Flow revenue grew 55% within six months — the largest contributor being the cross-category recommendation flows, which successfully moved single-product buyers into multi-category relationships.

Repeat purchase rate increased by 29%, with replenishment timing optimisation accounting for the largest share of that improvement; customers were reaching the right touchpoint at the moment their product was genuinely running low, not three weeks before or after.

Overall customer engagement lifted 22% across channels, driven by the re-engagement programme successfully reactivating 1 in 3 lapsed customers within 60 days of the campaign launch. The team scaled to running 22 active flows across the customer lifecycle — with the same headcount as before.

Results Summary