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5 Years and Counting: HexClad’s Partnership with PostPilot
Industry:
Home & GardenIn Partnership With:
Shopify
,
Klaviyo
,
This is a special case study. HexClad has been an incredible partner and direct mail power user for years. We extend an immense and heartfelt thanks to the entire HexClad team for trusting us with their program. Here’s to many more years of cutting through digital noise.
In the video interview above, HexClad’s Dir. of Retention, Noah Pine, shares his honest thoughts about working with PostPilot over the years, including on questions of incrementality and attribution.
Below is a timeline of HexClad’s use of direct mail, showing its evolution, scale, and expansion. The strategies shown reflect their changing business over the last five years. In the early 2020s, HexClad was a fast-growing mid-market brand. Their “hockey stick growth” followed in ‘23–24, and their direct mail program expanded to complement and help accelerate that growth. In the last couple years, it continues to grow in line with the company.
As Noah told us, “I’m more bullish on direct mail than I’ve ever been.”
Timeline TLDR:
- 2022–23: Initial testing, then scaling direct mail into Q4 ‘22. Doubling the program in 2023.
- 2024–25: Doubling again in 2024 with significant campaign automation; first major prospecting catalog drop. Scaling further in 2025 and tripling the program in Q4, including major prospecting campaigns.
- 2026: The sky’s the limit. Continued planned program growth with additional initiatives.
2022–2023: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship
2022: Testing + Our First BFCM
In 2022, HexClad was on a mission to combat one of their biggest challenges—one that’s affected brands more and more in the years since: driving more value out of their email list.
Specifically, they wanted to:
- Nudge new email subscribers (driven by Meta / TV) to make their first purchases
- Add meaningful touchpoints with VIPs to drive even more LTV
- Reach more 1x and 2x buyers, including those unsubscribed or suppressed from email, to drive 2nd and 3rd purchases
Rather than going harder on email and digital retargeting, though, they wanted to test a new channel. Ideally, one that they could then scale into BFCM.
That channel was direct mail, powered by PostPilot, which enabled the team to attack all their goals at once.
HexClad’s first direct mail test included:
- MailMatchTM: Lets brands send customers direct mail using only their emails. Used for email list + abandoned cart/checkout retargeting to drive net-new sales
- VIP winbacks: Sending their best customers mail
It was extremely successful. All segments drove an 8x+ ROAS. This compelled the team to heavily scale direct mail leading into BFCM ‘22.
And that BFCM performance was ridiculously strong. The ROAS melted faces, and direct mail drove seven figures in revenue.
- MailMatch (welcome postcards): 10x+ ROAS
- Winbacks/VIP Winback Segments: 12x+ ROAS
2023: “What if We Send a Lot More Mail?”
HexClad doubled down on direct mail in 2023.
After another hot chef summer with additional winback/VIP postcards tests (uniformly 10x+ ROAS), they dialed it up for BFCM 2023, targeting twice as many segments as over BFCM 2022.
Correspondingly, they doubled their BFCM revenue YoY—and this time, they ran in-app holdout testing to prove the incrementality of their campaigns.
The results were genuinely incredible. Their incremental ROAS (iROAS) ranged from 4.29x–25.95x, depending on the segment.
“PostPilot’s incrementality tracking is the gold standard. It makes decision-making easy.” —Connor Rolain, Head of Global Growth Marketing @ HexClad
2024–2025: Direct Mail at Scale
2024: Big Automations + Going Full-Funnel with Cold Prospecting
“PostPilot cares as much about HexClad’s success as we do. It feels like we have another member on the HexClad team who’s vouching for us.” —Noah Pine
Based on the mega-incremental success and lessons of BFCM 2023, HexClad began automating their program in 2024—the goals being to:
- Continue to run one-off seasonal and holiday campaigns
- Automate postcards to specific segments (based on testing success) to drive additional net-new and repeat revenue throughout the year
- Start prospecting
So, starting in 2024, HexClad turned on a number of automations, driving STRONG results all the way—including, but not limited to:
- MailMatch (Abandoned Checkout): 20.15x iROAS (!!)
- Winback (with Cardalogs): 2.87x iROAS — targeting last order date (LOD) of 1.5 years ago
- Winbacks: 10x+ ROAS
- VIP Winbacks: 15x+ ROAS
These automations have driven millions in incremental revenue since.
They’re also complementing HexClad’s Klaviyo program with physical touchpoints—for instance, sending a postcard at the end of an abandoned checkout sequence, or sending a postcard (or Cardalog) at the end of an email winback sequence.
The year of automations culminated in an even bigger, better BFCM, where HexClad threw fuel on the fire with a couple of huge firsts.
- First prospecting campaign: targeting powered by the beta release of our prospecting tool, AcquisitionAI, our proprietary, self-learning lookalike audience builder.
- First catalog drop: sent to tens of thousands of prospects
The October catalog drove a remarkable 5.15x ROAS on cold prospecting and marked a new, reliable acquisition channel for the team. And the rest of the season was like the previous two, with strong incremental results on MailMatch welcome postcards (10.06x iROAS) as well as winbacks (5.68x–12.22x iROAS) sent in November.
2025: Can We Go Even Bigger? Yes, Chef.
HexClad kicked off 2025 with direct mail support for another major sales event: the Super Bowl. 58% of the campaigns were incremental, and one campaign targeting multi-buyers (LOD 300 days ago) drove a 25x iROAS.
But everything really popped off in Q4.
HexClad tripled the number of BFCM campaigns sent YoY (high iROAS across the board across segments) and immediately launched a second prospecting drop in December to drive holiday sales and a new cohort of customers for 2026.
The BFCM prospecting drop was powered by an even-stronger AcquisitionAI (it’s self-learning!), this time driving a wild 5.12x incremental ROAS.
(Side note: HexClad also sent this card to one-time BFCM buyers from 2024 and 2023, which drove an 8.05x and 2.89x iROAS, respectively.)
The December prospecting drop, while not as sky-high as the BFCM drop, still drove a 2.82x iROAS, bringing in hordes of new customers for EOY holidays—customers who will be driven to repurchase via automated mailers in the weeks and months to come.
2026–Present: Michelin-Starred Mail
“I’m more bullish on direct mail than I’ve ever been. We’re going to be investing more than we have. Now’s the time where we can experiment and have more fun than we ever have.” —Noah
Hear, hear.
As we’ve entered the 5th year of our partnership, HexClad continues to build on the wins of previous years, and there’s a whole lot more coming down the pipe.
We’re talking:
- More catalogs
- More brand-building initiatives
- More acquisition
- More automations
- More… mail.
We’re here for it.
It’s been the experience of a lifetime on our end to work with such an extraordinarily talented team running one of the best brands in the biz.
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