Winback
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Who Is UpCircle Beauty?
UpCircle Beauty builds skincare, haircare and bodycare around a single idea: nothing useful should go to waste. Ingredients other brands discard, like coffee grounds, fruit stones and oat husks, become the base for cleansers, serums, moisturisers and face masks, all cruelty-free and B-Corp certified. It is sustainability with a clear mechanism, not just a claim on the label.
The brand has built a genuinely loyal following of over 600,000 customers on the strength of that story, backed by 30,000-plus five-star reviews and coverage from Vogue, Forbes and Glamour. Subscriptions are a core part of how customers experience UpCircle, turning a values-led purchase into a recurring habit. That makes every cancelled subscription a broken habit worth repairing, not just a lost order.
Circling the Drain
A cancelled subscriber rarely announces themselves. They simply stop opening the winback emails, stop responding to the SMS nudges, and stop revisiting the site altogether. Every channel UpCircle already runs depends on the customer choosing to look, and a cancelled subscriber has usually stopped looking at any of them.
That is what makes the segment so costly to ignore: a customer who was once one of the brand's most valuable relationships, engaged, paying, opening every email, quietly becomes invisible everywhere the brand can normally reach them. Present in the database, gone from every inbox and every feed, the customer is still there, just no longer reachable through anything UpCircle already sends.
Back in the Post
Paper Run runs an automated winback flow that identifies cancelled subscribers and sends them a personalised piece of direct mail, timed to land while the habit is still recoverable rather than long forgotten. The mailer gives UpCircle a physical moment to re-earn attention, reintroducing the brand's story in a format that sits on a counter rather than disappearing into a scroll.
The flow runs continuously in the background, layering on top of UpCircle's existing lifecycle emails rather than replacing them, so cancelled subscribers get a second channel making the case for coming back.
Full Circle
The winback flow is driving a 4.9X ROAS on cancelled subscribers, turning a segment that would otherwise sit dormant into a working reactivation channel. For a subscription brand, every reactivated customer is worth more than the single order it takes to bring them back, since a resumed subscription compounds the same way the original one did.
UpCircle's whole model is built on making sure nothing goes to waste, and the winback flow extends that thinking to the customer base itself: subscribers who cancel are not written off, they are simply on the next leg of the loop back.
"The subscribers who'd stopped opening anything from us were still opening their front door. That's the gap Paper Run closed."
Head of Digital Marketing, UpCircle Beauty
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