Brooklinen Gets 40% of Its Daily Revenue From Repeat Customers by Sending 7% Promotional Email, Not the Industry's 38%

Brooklinen was founded in 2014 by Rich and Vicki Fulop, a married couple with no prior background in textiles or manufacturing — Rich came from finance, Vicki from law and public relations. The idea reportedly traces to a hotel stay in Las Vegas, where the sheets were noticeably better than anything the couple owned at home, and the gap between hotel-quality bedding and what was actually available direct-to-consumer at an accessible price looked like an opening. They launched on Kickstarter in 2014 with a modest $50,000 funding target and raised roughly $237,000 by the campaign's close — a nearly 5x overshoot that became the first real signal the idea had legs. A decade later, Brooklinen is a $100 million-plus revenue business, still running its direct-to-consumer channel on Shopify Plus, with an email and retention program disciplined enough that it now shows up as its own case study in how a Shopify brand can grow without leaning on discounts to do it.

The founders' emails, not a platform's, built the first real list

Before Brooklinen had any institutional marketing infrastructure, Rich and Vicki Fulop personally emailed each of the 1,700 Kickstarter backers who funded the original campaign — a founder-to-customer relationship that most DTC brands never build directly at all, let alone at the very first cohort of buyers. That list, grown further through pre-launch incentives and referrals to a few thousand subscribers by launch day, became the seed of a retention philosophy that treated the email list as a relationship to be nurtured individually before it was a channel to be blasted at scale.

The early revenue trajectory validated that approach fast: Brooklinen did roughly $2.5 million in revenue in its first full year, grew to approximately $15 million by 2016, and crossed $25 million within two years of launch — reportedly built without a dedicated performance-marketing team driving most of that early growth, in a category (bedding) where trust and product-quality perception matter more than in most impulse-purchase DTC verticals. A customer buying sheets sight-unseen from a brand-new company is taking on more perceived risk than a customer buying a $30 accessory, which makes the founder-level, individually nurtured early relationship a plausible explanation for why that early trust gap closed as fast as it did.

Why Brooklinen sends 7% promotional email against an industry benchmark of 38%

The single most distinctive fact in Brooklinen's retention strategy is how little of its email volume is actually promotional: roughly 7%, against an industry benchmark cited at around 38%. Rich Fulop has been direct about the reasoning in interviews, describing his own reaction to discount-heavy tactics bluntly: "I cringe on discounts. I really don't like that." That's a genuinely unusual position for a DTC brand to hold as a matter of strategy rather than aspiration, because discounting is the easiest lever a marketing team has to pull when a growth number is soft — and Brooklinen's growth has, by its own account, come specifically from avoiding that lever rather than despite avoiding it.

A welcome sequence built like a relationship, not a funnel

Brooklinen's welcome-email cadence for new subscribers is unusually dense in its early days — in one documented test period, a new signup received 11 emails across 5 days — before settling into a steadier rhythm of roughly 3 emails per week across ongoing newsletter and lifecycle campaigns, a volume that's been reduced by roughly 36% compared to a previous period as the brand tuned frequency against fatigue. The logic isn't "email as often as possible" — it's front-loading brand education and product context at the exact moment a new subscriber's interest is highest, then pulling back once that initial window closes, rather than maintaining a flat, generic cadence indefinitely.

The shift from cart abandonment to browse abandonment

One specific, well-documented change in Brooklinen's lifecycle strategy is worth calling out on its own: the brand moved from a 4-email cart-abandonment sequence in 2018 to a 3-email browse-abandonment sequence by 2021 — deliberately engaging shoppers earlier in the funnel, before they've committed to adding an item to cart, rather than only re-engaging after they've already shown strong purchase intent and then dropped off. That's a meaningfully different targeting philosophy: a cart-abandonment email is reactive, chasing a customer who's already halfway convinced; a browse-abandonment email is proactive, trying to move a still-undecided shopper forward while the specific product they were looking at is still fresh. Fewer emails in the newer sequence (3 versus 4) alongside an earlier trigger point suggests the earlier intervention needed less follow-up persistence to work.

Post-purchase, Brooklinen runs an 8-email drip campaign spread across roughly a month after a sale closes — a sequence explicitly aimed at keeping the brand present for a customer's next purchase decision, not just confirming the order that already happened. Combined with the pre-purchase browse-abandonment sequence, the effect is a lifecycle program that invests real messaging density both before a customer's first purchase and well after it, with comparatively less emphasis on the single moment of cart abandonment that most DTC email programs treat as the primary battleground.

Testing discipline behind every send

Brooklinen reportedly A/B tests every email it sends, with segmentation applied consistently across campaigns rather than treated as an occasional advanced tactic. That constant-testing posture is what makes a counter-intuitive strategy like "send fewer promotional emails" defensible in the first place — the team isn't guessing that discount-light, nurture-heavy email works better, it's continuously measuring whether each specific send is earning its place in a subscriber's inbox, which is a meaningfully higher bar than most brands hold their lifecycle program to.

Forty percent of daily revenue from customers who've already bought once

The result of that cumulative discipline: roughly 40% of Brooklinen's daily revenue comes from repeat customers — a genuinely high figure for a considered-purchase home goods category, where a customer buying new sheets or a duvet cover isn't coming back every week the way a consumables brand's customer might. Brooklinen also crossed $100 million in revenue with the company citing a 40% revenue increase around that milestone, and posted 227% year-over-year net sales growth in 2021 — growth that, per the brand's own account, was achieved specifically without heavy reliance on the discount-driven repeat-purchase tactics that are the default playbook for most DTC brands trying to hit similar numbers.

The B2B expansion that freed the same instinct at a different scale

Brooklinen's more recent growth chapter, and the subject of Shopify's own official case study on the brand, is its B2B expansion into hospitality — hotels and other bulk buyers purchasing bedding at scale. Before adopting Shopify B2B, that side of the business ran on manual, phone-based ordering, which Brooklinen's Director of Emerging Channels, Nicolas Lukac, described plainly: "We weren't customer-forward with this process. We were order-forward." Moving B2B onto a dedicated Shopify storefront — mirroring the DTC experience while handling B2B-specific complexity like bulk pricing and account-based ordering — let B2B customers self-serve orders directly and gave the Brooklinen team automated reorder tracking and purchase-history-based communication instead of manual order-taking.

The result: the B2B team now spends roughly 80% of its time working directly with customers rather than processing orders by hand — the same underlying trade Brooklinen made on the DTC side, just at the account-management level instead of the individual-subscriber level. In both cases, automating the administrative layer (order processing on B2B, generic blast emails on DTC) freed human attention for the relationship-building work that actually drives repeat revenue — nurturing content on one side, direct account relationships on the other.

What this means for a Shopify brand relying on discounts to drive repeat purchase

The uncomfortable question Brooklinen's numbers raise for most DTC brands: if 38% of your email program is promotional and your repeat-purchase rate still isn't where you want it, is the discount actually earning its cost, or has it just become the path of least resistance for a lifecycle team without the time to build a real nurturing sequence? Brooklinen's answer was to invest that time upfront — dense welcome sequences, browse-stage rather than only cart-stage triggers, extended post-purchase drips — and treat discounting as a lever to avoid pulling rather than the default response to a soft month. That's a harder program to build than a recurring 20%-off cart-abandonment flow, and it doesn't pay off on the same short timeline. But a brand that's been running the discount-heavy version for a year without meaningfully moving its repeat-purchase rate has real evidence, in Brooklinen's numbers, that the alternative is at least worth testing on a segment of its list before assuming discounting is the only lever that works.