Winback
+44%
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Who Is Universal Standard?
Universal Standard makes the case, in every collection it ships, that size should never dictate the shopping experience. Denim, dresses, workwear and loungewear come in sizes 00 to 40, styled and priced identically across the entire range, so a size 6 and a size 36 buy the same product with the same quality standard. The brand’s Fit Liberty program, offering free exchanges for a full year, removes the fit uncertainty that has historically kept extended-size shoppers from trusting a new brand.
That promise has built real scale. Universal Standard’s best-selling denim launched with a waitlist over a thousand names long and now sits in more than five hundred thousand closets. Its customers are not shopping a niche, they are shopping the same brand everyone else is, which is precisely the point.
Out of Rotation
A customer who buys once from Universal Standard has already found something rare, a brand that fits and flatters at their actual size. The challenge is what happens next: a single purchase can sit at the back of the closet while the customer drifts toward whatever fills their inbox, simply because nothing reminded them the brand exists in a way that cut through.
Winback email to lapsed one-time buyers competes with every other retailer’s inbox presence, and it rarely recreates the tactile, considered feeling that made the first purchase land. Universal Standard needed a way to bring lapsed customers back into rotation that felt as deliberate as the fit itself.
Delivered Back Into Rotation
Paper Run runs a winback flow targeting customers who have gone quiet since their last order, putting a physical mailer in front of them measured against a holdout group to isolate the lift direct mail is actually driving. The mailer is built around Universal Standard’s own product and fit story, giving a lapsed customer a tangible reason to put the brand back into their closet rotation rather than a generic ‘we miss you’ discount.
Segmentation is based on purchase recency and lapsed status, so the flow reaches customers precisely at the point where a nudge is most likely to work, rather than blanket-mailing the full lapsed base.
Standard Practice, Exceptional Returns
Measured against holdout, the winback flow is driving a 6.4X incremental return on ad spend with a 44% uplift in conversion among the customers it targets. For a brand whose value proposition is repeat, everyday wear rather than a single occasion purchase, winning a lapsed customer back tends to reopen a much longer purchasing relationship, not just a single order.
The holdout structure gives Universal Standard a clean read on what direct mail alone is contributing, and the flow now runs as a standing part of the retention program, recovering revenue from a segment that email had already stopped reaching.
[Quote pending — confirm exact wording with Polina Veksler before publishing.]
Co-Founder and CEO, Universal Standard
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