Abandoned Browse
48%
60-day risk free trial
Who Is Southern Scholar?
Southern Scholar makes dress socks for men who treat the last detail of an outfit as seriously as the first. Founded in Dallas by Kevin Wohlman after a year spent solving a problem he could not find a solution for elsewhere, the brand builds every pair around a proprietary blend and a 200 needle count construction designed to fit, stay up and perform, not just look sharp for an hour.
Over 150,000 customers and a 96% five-star rating later, Southern Scholar has turned a wardrobe afterthought into a considered purchase, backed by a no-questions-asked satisfaction guarantee and a growing membership club for repeat buyers. It is a brand built on getting a small, overlooked detail exactly right, which makes every browser who leaves without buying a detail worth following up on.
Cold Feet
Socks are an easy thing to browse and an easy thing to leave. A customer scrolling through colours, patterns and lengths has shown real intent, but nothing forces the decision the way a full cart does, and that gap is exactly where hesitation lives. Digital retargeting chases that hesitation across the same channels the customer is already tuning out.
For Southern Scholar, browsers are rarely uninterested: they are comparing, waiting for payday, or simply distracted before they commit. Winning them back means showing up somewhere with more weight than another banner ad, in a way that makes the case for a considered purchase rather than repeating the same digital nudge.
A Softer Touch
Paper Run runs an automated direct mail flow triggered off on-site browse behaviour, sending a physical follow-up to visitors who showed intent but left before buying. The mailer gives Southern Scholar a tactile way to close that gap, putting the product back in front of the customer in a format built to be picked up, not scrolled past.
The flow is tested against a holdout group, with every result measured against browsers who received no mailer at all. That structure lets Southern Scholar attribute the lift specifically to the mail programme, running the flow automatically and continuously alongside its existing retargeting.
Solid Footing
Measured against the holdout, the flow is driving a 4.4X incremental ROAS and a 48% uplift in conversion versus the control group, results that reflect genuinely new revenue rather than sales the brand would have closed anyway through other channels. For a brand this dependent on repeat purchase and word of mouth, every browser converted is also a future five-star review and a future Gentleman's Sock Club member.
That holdout-tested lift is what makes the channel worth running as a permanent fixture rather than a one-off test. Southern Scholar now has a proven, automated way to close the gap between a browse and a buy, on top of the channels it already runs.
"Paper Run gives us a way to reach browsers at exactly the point where an email or an ad isn't closing the gap. It's become a genuine performance channel, not just an experiment."
Founder, Southern Scholar
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