Two Dudes is a New Zealand men's grooming brand founded in 2020 by mates Tomas Tappin and Michael McRae, with a simple idea: make looking after yourself easy for the everyday Kiwi bloke.
Natural, NZ-made formulations for face, hair and body, sold without the jargon or the chiselled-abs marketing the category is known for – and with 10% of profits going to men's health charities. What started as a side hustle is now one of Aotearoa's most recognisable grooming names, stocked across New Zealand and Australia.
Two Dudes came to Atlas to lift their email marketing across both markets. Flows were ticking over steadily, but campaigns were underdeveloped, and what landed in the inbox didn't look like the brand people knew from the shelf. The goal was a Klaviyo programme that could do three things at once: grow the audience, grow revenue, and put the Two Dudes personality in front of subscribers properly.
The easy way to grow email revenue is to discount harder. That was off the table. It would have eaten margin and cheapened a brand built on straight talk, so the growth had to come from better strategy and better creative rather than bigger offers. On top of that, the programme had to run across two markets with different trading calendars, and scale in volume without the list going cold or the quality slipping – the usual cost of sending more
Our commerce strategy, customer experience & retention and UX teams worked as one. We built a new design direction off the brand-spanking-new brand bible the dudes shared with us, so every send carried the brand rather than a generic template. Then we widened the campaign calendar – seasonal moments, product storytelling and genuinely useful educational content – balanced so subscribers got something worth opening between promotions. Continuous A/B testing on subject lines, formats and design kept the programme improving instead of plateauing.
A rolling campaign programme, with every email designed, built, QA'd, approved and scheduled in advance. Consistency by design, not by scramble. Alongside it, we audited and rebuilt the automations: missing flows were created, existing ones sharpened and rebranded for a cohesive identity, and A/B testing set to run continuously so incremental gains keep compounding.
The shift was immediate and powerful. Campaigns went from a minor revenue stream to the primary driver of email performance, more than tripling year-on-year. Subscriber reach grew almost fivefold – and open rates held at 45–52%, proving the bigger audience was still an engaged one.
