Winback
47
60-day risk free trial
Built on Ancient Wisdom, Backed by Science
Ancient + Brave is a UK wellness brand founded by Kate Prince with an award-winning range of collagen peptides, functional supplements, and adaptogenic blends. Rooted in ancestral health principles and validated by rigorous clinical research, the brand has grown into one of the UK's fastest-growing wellness companies, earning B Corp certification, membership of 1% for the Planet, and a loyal subscriber base built around daily ritual.
From its bestselling True Collagen and Wild Marine Collagen to its Brave Blends and mushroom tinctures, Ancient + Brave has built a product range that customers weave deeply into their routines. Subscriptions, powered through the brand's partnership with Recharge, are the commercial backbone of that loyalty. When customers subscribe, they are not just reordering. They are committing to a daily habit that supports how they feel.
When Loyal Subscribers Go Quiet
Like all subscription brands, Ancient + Brave faces the ongoing challenge of winning back subscribers who have paused or cancelled. These are not cold prospects. They are customers who already know and love the products, who have experienced the rituals first-hand, and for whom the path back to subscribing is shorter than any new customer journey.
The difficulty is reach. With industry email open rates averaging around 40%, a large proportion of lapsed subscribers simply cannot be contacted through digital channels alone. Ancient + Brave needed a way to reconnect with these customers in a channel they could not scroll past, skip, or leave unopened.
Recharge Meets the Letterbox
Ancient + Brave activated Paper Run's native integration with Recharge to build a fully automated winback flow, triggered directly by subscription cancellation events. Lapsed subscribers who were not engaging with email automatically received a beautifully printed, personalised postcard, arriving at their door with a reminder of the rituals they had stepped away from.
The Paper Run and Recharge partnership meant the entire flow was configured once and ran without ongoing input from the team. Custom Recharge events powered the trigger logic seamlessly, ensuring every relevant lapsed subscriber entered the flow at exactly the right moment. Paper Run's holdout testing tool was used to design a controlled incrementality test: a test group received the winback postcard; a control group did not. The holdout structure allowed Ancient + Brave to measure the precise impact of direct mail in isolation.
The Brave Numbers
The holdout results confirmed the channel's power. Ancient + Brave's Recharge-integrated winback flow delivered a 47% uplift in subscriber winbacks among the group who received direct mail, and a 6.8X incremental ROAS against the holdout control. The numbers represent genuinely incremental revenue, not customers who would have returned regardless.
Fully automated, rigorously measured, and requiring no ongoing maintenance from the CRM team, the flow has become a permanent part of Ancient + Brave's retention architecture. For a subscription brand where reactivated subscribers represent compounding lifetime value over months and years, the downstream impact of that 47% uplift extends well beyond any single campaign metric.
The Recharge integration made this incredibly simple to set up, and the holdout data gave us the confidence that direct mail was genuinely driving incremental winbacks. It is now one of our most efficient retention channels.
CRM Manager, Ancient + Brave
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