How Gigawatt Coffee Roasters grew subscriptions by 7.5% in 6 weeks by integrating Smartrr Lifecycle into Klaviyo

Great coffee, no way to predict timing

Gigawatt Coffee Roasters was co-founded in February 2020 by Eli and Jen Colemanin Bensenville, IL. They are one of only 1% of roasters worldwide using fluid bed airroasting, a method that produces smoother, cleaner coffee without the bitter or burnt flavors of traditional drum roasting. They attend 250+ farmers markets and events annually across Chicagoland, ship nationwide with $5 flat-rate shipping, and have earned 2,700+ five-star reviews. Every dollar comes from organic content, in-person relationships, and repeat customers.

Gigawatt was already using Smartrr for subscriptions and Klaviyo for email marketing. But they had a timing problem. Their repurchase flows triggered on fixed schedules (a set number of days after a customer's last order) with no way to know whether that timing actually matched when someone was running low on coffee.

"We had a solid winback flow in Klaviyo and a growing subscriptionbase through Smartrr. But we were guessing at timing. We'd send awinback email at a fixed interval and hope it landed when someone was actually running low. For a lean team with no marketing department, every email has to earn its open."
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JEN COLEMAN, CO-FOUNDER, GIGAWATT COFFEE ROASTERS

Gigawatt's approach before Smartrr Lifecycle

Like most DTC brands, Gigawatt's retention setup relied on time-based triggers: awinback email sent X days after last purchase, directing customers to a standardproduct page. They had the right tools (Smartrr for subscriptions, Klaviyo for email)but the intelligence layer was missing.

The core issue: coffee consumption varies by household. The amount ordered, thegrind, the frequency of use. All of it influences when someone needs to repurchase. A 30-day trigger catches some customers at the right moment and misses everyone else. For a two-person team without a marketing department, there's no bandwidth to manually optimize flows for individual customers.

Why fixed-interval flows fall short

There are two compounding problems with time-based repurchase flows for aproduct like coffee:

Timing mismatch. Customers vary dramatically in how quickly they go through a bag. An arbitrary 30-day trigger catches some customers right when they're running low, and emails the rest too early or too late, resulting in low engagement and wasted sends.

Friction at the point of purchase. Even a well-timed email loses impact if it lands on a product page built for first-time buyers. Reviews, usage tips, and navigation that a returning customer doesn't need all stand between intent and checkout. For a lean team, every touchpoint has to convert.

How they solved it with Smartrr Lifecycle

Smartrr Lifecycle is a predictive retention engine built into Gigawatt's existing Smartrr plan. It analyzes Shopify order history, factoring in SKU, quantity, order frequency, and seasonality, to predict exactly when each customer is ready to reorder, cross-sell, or convert to a subscription. Those predictions sync directly to Klaviyo, triggering flows at the right moment for each individual customer.

"We already had Smartrr for subscriptions and Klaviyo for email. Smartrr Lifecycle was the missing intelligence layer. It told us when to reach each customer instead of us guessing."
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JEN COLEMAN, CO-FOUNDER, GIGAWATT COFFEE ROASTERS

Hear the story from the founders

The results

Results are reported across two windows, reflecting different data sources. Klaviyoflow performance covers the initial 18-day deployment period (March 14 – April 1,2026). Subscriber growth data comes from Smartrr analytics and extends to April 27, six weeks after activation.