With brands racing to increase first-party data capabilities amidst growing privacy concerns around third-party tracking, Repeat today announced a Series A investment led by Battery Ventures. Along with the financing, Repeat also announced a series of new product features to help consumer packaged goods brands better serve their existing customers by making reordering everyday items easier—a key growth lever for brands as new customer acquisition costs continue to rise.
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Repeat cofounders Sarah Wissel and Kim Stiefel (Photo: Business Wire)
Existing investors, including Harlem Capital and Mucker Capital, also participated in the $6 million financing round. Battery’s Neeraj Agrawal, a veteran software investor, will join Repeat’s board. Repeat was founded by entrepreneurs Kim Stiefel and Sarah Wissel, who previously started a DTC brand together.
Growth-stage CPG brands like by Humankind, Jot, and Vegamour already use Repeat to automate replenishment reminders for customers, and to deliver one-click reordering experiences. Now, with new product features like email-service provider and SMS integrations; QR code support; and out-of-the box, product replenishment dashboards, they’re also using that technology to reacquire their customers from other channels, like Amazon. In doing so, they’re achieving higher margins on sales and gaining valuable insights into how often customers actually use their products.
“We’re always looking for ways to make life easy for our customers. That’s why we use Repeat,” said James Booth, VP of Growth at Jot. “A lot of customers don’t want to subscribe, and we want to give them an exceptional experience. Repeat does that. In some ways, Repeat is even easier for a customer to use than a subscription.”
Core to Repeat is a headless replenishment cart that’s anchored to a customer’s previous purchases and prepopulated with items due for replenishment, allowing for one-click reordering and easy, new product discovery. Headless technology allows brands to separate the front end of their ecommerce store (like their website design and presentation) from their back-end (like Shopify) to deliver faster, more flexible shopping experiences. Brands use Repeat’s email integration with Klaviyo, as well as automated SMS notifications and QR code support, to send returning customers to their Repeat carts instead of a brand’s category page or PDP.
That cart experience—which is specifically built for brands that sell highly replenishable items in categories like food & beverage, beauty & wellness, toiletries and cleaning supplies—leads to faster checkout times (often less than 15 seconds) and higher conversion rates (upwards of 43% lift), according to Repeat data.
This better reordering experience means brands retain more customers and, therefore, collect sales data not available from retail partners, such as how often customers reorder, and when is the optimum time to push for the next purchase.
Repeat not only answers these questions with out-of-the-box dashboards, but it also analyzes that data and automates reminder notifications for brands—essentially putting the transactional aspect of retention marketing on autopilot.
“We’re all getting used to those ‘Buy Again’ buttons from Amazon, and Target, but direct-to-consumer brands often don’t have the resources to build those types of solutions internally,” said Stiefel, cofounder and CEO of Repeat. “And that’s a problem: 43% of consumers said they started an online order from a previous purchase in 2020. Brands started to realize last year that they overlooked this aspect of retention. We help them fix that fast.”
Repeat has grown 300% in the last 12 months, and plans to use the latest funding round to accelerate product development and sales. It expects to triple headcount by the end of the year.
Stiefel and cofounder Sarah Wissel founded Repeat after launching a subscription T-shirt brand. During customer development calls for that T-shirt brand, the two found that most customers didn’t actually want a subscription—they just wanted a reminder and an easier way to reorder when the time was right. That insight, coupled with industry data showing that more than 70% of an average brand’s customers will never subscribe to their product, led Stiefel and Wissel to pivot from a technology-enabled brand to a technology company.
“We had to pick a lane,” Stiefel said. “And it was clear from conversations with other brands and consumers that this opportunity was much, much larger.”
“CPG brands have largely grown through business-to-business relationships—and that means retailers have retained the most valuable sales data and consumer behavior insights,” said Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures. “The shift to DTC is fundamentally changing this, and brands are recognizing the need for actionable insights and automated retention strategies. We’re incredibly excited about working with Kim and Sarah and the technology Repeat’s building, because we think this is a critical piece of the stack for brands as they shift to owning the customer relationship.”
ABOUT REPEAT
Repeat is the easiest way to reorder everyday goods online. CPG brands use Repeat to give their customers faster, personalized reordering experiences and get deeper insights into how their customers are using those products. Founded in Venice, California, Repeat is a distributed team of 11 helping brands—and their customers—solve ecommerce’s replenishment problem.
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