Brunt Workwear
Scaling BRUNT Workwear with email & SMS marketing
Services
retention marketing
Overview
BRUNT Workwear is one of the fastest-growing brands on Shopify, building a loyal following in work boots through quality, affordability, and a direct relationship with tradespeople. Having eclipsed eight figures on footwear sales alone, the brand partnered with Darkroom to solve its next challenge: converting one-time boot buyers into repeat customers, and introducing a new apparel line to an audience that knew BRUNT only for boots.
Eight figures in boots, single-purchase customers
BRUNT’s work boots spread by word of mouth among tradespeople, a loyal audience that is hard to reach through ads. Boots are a considered purchase that customers replace about every 18 months, so the brand’s fast growth came almost entirely from new customers. Most buyers bought one pair and never came back, and few of them ever saw BRUNT’s growing apparel line of work shirts, hoodies and accessories. Darkroom saw the bigger retention opportunity in apparel sales to existing boot buyers. The brand needed post-purchase flows, customer segmentation and lifecycle campaigns that introduced apparel to boot buyers in the weeks after their first order.
Segmentation that turned footwear loyalty into apparel revenue
Darkroom partnered with BRUNT to build a retention program designed around a single strategic insight: boot buyers who already trust the brand are the highest-probability apparel customers. The team implemented segmented post-purchase flows that introduced apparel at the right interval after a boot purchase, when the customer had experienced the product quality but before the brand faded from their routine. Lifecycle campaigns were structured by product affinity, purchase recency, and engagement level, ensuring that every email and SMS touchpoint moved the customer toward a second category rather than just a second pair of boots. Within six months, the retention program had established a scalable engine for cross-category conversion - transforming BRUNT from a footwear brand with occasional repeat buyers into a workwear brand with a growing apparel business built on existing customer trust.
