I built the lifecycle system a luxury skincare brand launches on, and the gate that keeps its voice
Ki’olal pairs Mayan botanicals with modern formulation, at $87 to $895. I owned email, SMS and customer experience. I specced the campaign system and the automations under it to run in Klaviyo, and built the quality gate that holds the brand voice at production speed. I also worked on parts of the storefront and its user flow, and did the compliance work that opens new retail channels.
A beautiful brand with an empty inbox
Ki’olal had the brand, the products and a 38-page summer campaign vision. The business had no lifecycle layer: no calendar in motion, no automation catching a purchase or an abandoned cart, and no path onto Amazon or TikTok Shop.
The constraint that shaped everything was voice. Ki’olal writes poetry backed by proof, an evening ritual of cleanser, toner and a Tepezcohuite night treatment, framed as ceremonia. Luxury customers can smell templated email in one line, and volume production usually flattens exactly this kind of voice. The founder’s feedback landed inline on my specs, through my kiolal.com inbox, which kept the bar where it belonged.
One engagement, five layers: a 100-day campaign, the always-on automations underneath it, a measurable quality gate in place of subjective review, and the storefront and retail work that carries the brand beyond its own inbox.
The storefront the campaign runs on
Five layers, from campaign arc to retail shelf
A 100-day arc, written as build-ready specs
The Summer Skin-to-Soul Ceremonia runs June 22 to September 30: eleven emails on a weekly Thursday cadence in three monthly movements, three warm-up sends before it, and thirteen SMS riding beside it. Every email is a build-ready spec down to the module: email three runs thirteen of them, from the hidden preheader to a footer with the Miami address, with the art direction written like direction. "The feeling: the day is over; restoration begins."
Every token in the spec ships with a default, so a raw token never renders and the opening line reads "night is when your skin does its deepest work" whether or not a first name exists. Images export at 2× under 500KB with no baked-in text, because clients block images and dark mode inverts them. The spec even polices its own facts: "real formulas only," with the stale ingredient list from an old landing page named and banned.
11 campaign emails + 3 warm-ups + 13 SMS · one offer, repeated identically everywhereThree flows, and the discipline is in the restraint
Post-purchase opens two to four hours after the order with a line that knows what it is: "consider this a warm hello rather than a receipt." Delivery triggers the ritual-teaching email, then a review ask seven days later, with a final follow-up only if no review came in. The abandoned-cart pair recovers with Shopify’s live cart block in the email.
The winback flow shows it best. At sixty days quiet: "We kept your place," warm and offer-free. At seventy-five: still no discount, just how the evening ritual feels. Only at ninety days does the single gift appear, and then the flow closes itself out: "We would rather leave you in peace than crowd your inbox." Every trigger, delay and exit condition is written into the spec, so the flows assemble in Klaviyo without one judgment call left to the builder.
3 flows · 9 emails + 4 SMS · discount held back until day 90, then sunsetThree judges replace one opinion
Every email passes a de-AI edit first, working from a written list of tells: em-dash overuse, openings on a negation, manufactured antithesis, rule-of-three rhythm, and a banned-word list running from "elevate" to "game-changer." Then three LLM judges score in parallel, each playing a different reader. A subscriber deciding open, keep reading, click; a senior email strategist auditing craft; and an editor hunting machine-written prose, which returns the exact flagged phrases.
An email ships when all three score 85 or higher, three iteration rounds maximum. The gate caught real problems: judge B flagged a rendered email still hard-coding an old hero size after the spec had changed. And the de-AI pass shows up in the calendar itself. A subject line drafted as "Skincare was never just about your skin" shipped as "The five quiet minutes your skin has been missing."
De-AI edit → 3 judges in parallel → gate at 85 → 11 of 11 through, averaging 86.7 / 89.0 / 90.5The pages the campaign lands on
Lifecycle traffic is only as good as where it arrives, so part of this engagement ran on the site itself: sections of the storefront design and the user flow from an email click through to checkout. The offer had to read identically in four places, the announcement bar, the hero card, the early-access page and the email itself, because a customer who reads three versions of one gift stops believing all three.
The capture layer is where lifecycle begins, so I built it to earn the contact rather than trap it: email and SMS taken with separate consent, TCPA language on the phone field, and a stated trade of 10% off. I also crawled the full sitemap, ten product pages and nine collections included, into a knowledge base, ran a technical and SEO audit, and delivered a prioritized fix brief, including the pricing bug that listed a $115 mist at zero dollars.
One offer, four surfaces · dual-consent capture · full-sitemap audit with a ranked fix listBeyond the inbox: Amazon, FDA, and the site itself
The same engagement carried the brand toward shelves it did not yet stand on. I built Amazon listing worksheets for all ten SKUs, title, bullets, backend search terms, structured attributes and A+ plans, from a master template designed so an operations person can create the listing with zero guessing. Two audits and a three-wave handoff sequence the launch: hero products first, ritual bundles second, halo sets last.
For TikTok Shop eligibility I wrote the FDA pathway: a step-by-step MoCRA facility registration guide and the formal cosmetics compliance statement. Between them they cleared the paperwork that had kept the brand on its own storefront and nowhere else.
10 SKU worksheets · 2 audits · 3-wave handoff · FDA MoCRA + compliance statementThree rules behind the system
Voice survives volume, or the system failed.
I built the panel because scaling output usually flattens a brand voice. Poetry and proof, scored by three lenses, beats one tired reviewer at 11pm.
Specs an operator can run blind.
Every deliverable, email, flow, or Amazon listing, ends in a worksheet the next person executes without asking a question. Handoff quality is part of the work.
One source of truth, and it is the live site.
The website is baseline, the campaign playbook is target state, and the rule is written down. Copy never quotes a future the customer can see is missing.
What the engagement delivered
The campaign window runs through September, and send-performance data belongs to the brand, so this page reports the system: what was built, and the scores it shipped with.
Lifecycle, installed
23 emails and 17 SMS specced Klaviyo-ready: an 11-email campaign arc with three warm-ups, and three automation flows covering post-purchase, winback and abandoned cart. Cadence, tokens, triggers and exits all on file.
What the gate caught
All eleven campaign emails cleared the three-judge gate. The scores are mine on my own rubric, so the number worth reading is what the panel stopped. Judge B caught a rendered email still hard-coding an old hero size after the spec had changed. A subject line drafted as “Skincare was never just about your skin” shipped as “The five quiet minutes your skin has been missing.”
New shelves, open
Ten Amazon SKU worksheets handed off in three launch waves, with the FDA MoCRA registration guide and cosmetics compliance statement behind them. The registration went through, the listings are live and TikTok Shop approved the seller. A promotional campaign is running on that footing now.
Related work
Klaviyo
Python toolchain
3-judge LLM gate
TikTok Shop compliance
Site & SEO audit
Need lifecycle that sounds like your brand, at production speed?
I build the campaign system, the automations and the quality gate, then hand over specs your team runs without me.