How Step One achieved 65x Klaviyo ROI with data-driven decision making

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Founded in 2017 by Sydney entrepreneur Greg Taylor with just $5,000, Step One began in a bedroom—and it grew fast. Initially launching with men’s underwear, the brand rapidly expanded to include women’s and kids’ collections.

In under 5 years, Step One went public on the Australian Stock Exchange, generating over $70 million in revenue and $10 million in profit and expanding into the UK and US. And throughout it all, they’ve relied on Klaviyo.

Learn how Klaviyo helped Step One sustainably scale to 1.6M global customers  

Challenge

Like any fast-growth business, Step One’s biggest challenge is maintaining their growth trajectory long term.

“The real challenge for us is how to continue chasing growth in a profitable manner,” says Hani Rifai, head of martech, CRO, and engineering at Step One. 

Solution

Step One has been clear-headed about the importance of customer data, and they’ve owned and stored it in-house from day one—much of it in Klaviyo.

We look at the customer data with intent and under a microscope to reveal where our success is coming from and where our biggest opportunities are.

The data revealed two big opportunities for Step One: increasing customer value in their base and expanding in the UK, where they were already seeing strong growth signals.

Strategy

Since focusing on increasing lifetime value and expansion in the UK, Step One has relied on Klaviyo’s data and experimentation tools to uncover opportunities, including:

• More strategic discounting: With Klaviyo, Step One can identify their customer’s propensity to convert, then send targeted offers based on this information. This helps avoid unnecessary discounting, while maximising revenue and safeguarding margins.
• Increased cross-selling:  After a data deep dive, Step One noticed that 40% of people who purchased from their men’s category had self-identified as women. But their recommendation engine was based on the customer’s gender, instead of the category they were actually purchasing from.
  
  With Klaviyo, Step One built a welcome email that asks new customers which product category they wanted to view. Klaviyo then tracks clicks from this email, giving Step One a more reliable data point for product recommendations to increase cross-selling.
• Efficient international expansion: As a lean team, Step One need to repurpose content efficiently across regions. They use Klaviyo’s robust testing tools to try our Australian content in the UK to see what performs. “Klaviyo testing and optimisation tools enable us to build out in the UK lifecycle marketing with hyper-localisation and personalisation,” Rifai shares.

So far, this data-first approach has helped drive impressive growth. In 2024, Step One saw 53% YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, and 16% YoY growth in total ecommerce revenue. New customers grew by 312,000, bringing the total to 1,670,000 globally.

Klaviyo is built for growth and we’ve seen that first hand. From our early days in a bedroom to becoming a publicly listed company, Step One has relied on Klaviyo all the way. For us, it’s not just a marketing tool but a partnership that helps us make rapid decisions, optimise our marketing efforts, and scale quickly.