The marketing details that made Estrid blow up

It started in 2019.

Covid hit, wallets shifted online and razor brand Estrid launched into the perfect storm.

But timing alone doesn’t build a successful cult subscription brand.

We recently interviewed Başak Bitlislioglu, Estrid’s Director of Performance Marketing. She has scaled two of Europe’s fastest-growing DTC brands (Estrid and NA-KD), grown full-funnel strategies, and made subscription models STICK.

We had a lot of questions for her about Estrid’s monumental growth, how they’ve made subscription work, and how they’ve nailed internationalisation. Here’s what she shared with us…

1. Make retention non-negotiable

Estrid’s product is premium, but still priced to undercut competitors. Customers love it, and that love fuels retention. But even a great product will fail if the experience is wrong.

Estrid prioritised customer interviews, post purchase surveys, trust pilot reviews, and really listened. Making sure the customers’ experience was a priority.

Exhibit A:

When their customers gave feedback that they were drowning in razor blades because subscription cycles were too short, Estrid scrapped their 30-day cycle. While most brands would have hesitated to do this in the hopes of squeezing more revenue out of shorter cycles, Estrid knew that loyalty is built by respecting people, not rinsing them.

So they moved subscriptions to 60/90/120 days.

It was counterintuitive, maybe even risky, but it worked.

Retention went up.

LTV grew.

Revenue followed.

If you’re optimising for more transactions, you might want to pause and think about how to optimise for longer relationships instead.

2. Treat churn differently

Churn didn’t kill Estrid’s LTV.

Surveys showed that their customers weren’t switching to competitors, but instead were walking into Boots, Superdrug, or Sainsbury’s and buying Estrid off the shelf. With distribution in 10,000 doors across Europe, churn online didn’t equal churn overall. The brand kept its lifetime value alive — just through a different channel.

Başak’s top tip? Map where customers go when they “churn.” They may still be buying from you.

3. Collapse the funnel

Estrid don't have a 7-touchpoint saga. Their customer journey is short.

Great visuals paired with effective paid social and influencer marketing became their mid-funnel powerhouse by building awareness, educating, and converting in one hit.

If your product doesn’t need comparison shopping, stop over-engineering funnels.

4. Localise by behaviour

Research into different markets showed that Swedish consumers bought based on aesthetics and branding. German consumers on the other hand wanted third party validation, social proof and good functionality. And the selling point for Brits? Strong brand values and great prices.

These discoveries affected how Estrid approached their marketing mix.

They decided not to allocate the same percentage of budget to each channel in different markets, and instead tweaked it according to what had the biggest leverage in each country.

In Germany, for example, where third party validation and social proofing is much more valued pre-purchase, they paid much more attention to influencer marketing. In comparison, in the UK where this is not so much a priority, the channel mix is split more evenly.

5. Fail fast, pivot faster

Did you know Estrid also launched a male face razor?

When Estrid were gearing up for the product launch they strategised for this new male audience by switching from Instagram influencers to Twitch and YouTube collabs. But after launching the product they saw that these collabs didn’t have a strong enough ROI . Month over month improvement simply wasn’t enough.

Instead of burning more budget, they dug deeper.

They asked, ‘who really buys men’s razors?’

And they realised that a significant proportion of people buying men’s razors were women. Women were buying for partners, sons, dads.

So Estrid pivoted their strategy to campaigns that included women, like couple campaigns.

Suddenly, efficiency improved.

Similarly, they had a stumbling block when they launched deodorant subscriptions. When Estrid went back to their customers to ask why, they said it was because people wanted to know what the other scents were before committing.

Estrid listened. They added free samples of all other scents whenever customers ordered.

The result? Conversion jumped 40%.

So when in doubt, don’t just assume it’s the product. Look into consumer psychology and it’ll fix more problems than you know.