Gymwrap Achieved 142x ROI by Consolidating SMS and Email

No slipping during burpees, or adjusting mid-sprint. No hair falling in your face when you're trying to hold a plank. Gymwrap makes headbands that stay put.

Founded by actress Nicole Ari Parker, the California-based fitness brand built its reputation on solving a problem active women know well: Workout accessories that can't keep up with the workout.

But as Chief Marketing Officer Hume Merritt prepared for Gymwrap's biggest revenue season—January, February, and March, when New Year's resolutions drive peak sales—the brand's marketing operations weren’t nearly as reliable as their headbands. Email lived on one platform, SMS on another, and the siloed data would be a problem heading into critical months.

With a lean team managing 139,000+ subscribers across multiple marketing tools, Gymwrap needed more than another software tool.

"I needed a true strategic partner to help navigate SMS best practices and prove [its] incrementality over email," Hume says.

Gymwrap had been an Intuit Mailchimp customer for 10 years but was only utilizing the email product while managing their SMS program with a third party. They decided to consolidate email and SMS with Mailchimp, thanks in large part to the dedicated hands-on support from their Customer Success Manager (CSM).

After making that move, Gymwrap finally had the unified view and strategic guidance to turn their marketing into what Hume calls "roll out of bed money,” with revenue flowing in automatically, even while the team sleeps.

The challenge: Fragmented platforms heading into peak season

Gymwrap's revenue calendar runs opposite than of most e-commerce brands. While others chase Black Friday and holiday shoppers in Q4, Gymwrap sees its biggest sales surge in the first quarter of the calendar year as people commit to fitness goals. Those 3 months determine the brand's annual performance.

However, with email campaigns running through Mailchimp and SMS living elsewhere, these separate databases offered no centralized view of customer behavior. When Hume looked at performance data, he couldn't see which customers preferred email versus SMS, or whether someone who ignored emails might actually be highly responsive to text messages.

Beyond the technical setup, Hume needed strategic guidance. He'd seen SMS campaigns underperform on other brands, and he wasn't convinced it would work better for Gymwrap. He wondered whether SMS could generate revenue in addition to email, or if sales would simply be split between SMS and email. "I needed to understand best practices for frequency, use cases, and making sure it was incremental on top of what we were doing for email," Hume says.

The tools: SMS marketing, Shopify integration, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager

Hume started by testing whether Mailchimp's SMS could actually outperform his current provider. During Black Friday through Cyber Monday, he ran identical creative across both platforms to get a clean comparison.

The results answered his incrementality question definitively: Mailchimp outperformed his current supplier, and the difference was significant enough to make the decision clear. "When you see good results, you're like, okay, I'll take it," Hume says.

Consolidating SMS and email and connecting them to Mailchimp's Shopify integration provided Hume with a centralized view of customer behavior across channels. "I can see if someone isn't buying from emails but prefers SMS as their interaction method,” he says. “Instead of archiving a seemingly inactive customer, I now have the data to meet them where they actually want to shop."

That unified data enabled Gymwrap to create marketing automation flows that work continuously in the background. The team updated their classic automations to new flows for abandoned carts, welcome series, and re-engagement campaigns, all synced with real-time Shopify data.

Hume also credits his CSM with building Gymwrap's capacity to use Mailchimp strategically.

He had used Klaviyo in a previous job and wanted more dedicated assistance. A Mailchimp CSM instead provides one-to-one support tailored to Gymwrap's specific needs.

For example, when Hume mentioned planning a UK launch, his Mailchimp CSM proactively shared information about the platform’s global SMS expansion and helped map out which flows would need adjustment for international markets. And when the brand needed holiday popup designs, the CSM brought in Mailchimp's design team and had new creative approved and implemented within 48 hours.

The results: 142x ROI and nearly 5x higher revenue per message

The head-to-head testing during Black Friday through Cyber Monday showed that Mailchimp's SMS delivered nearly 5 times more revenue per message than what Gymwrap had been using, generating $0.587 per recipient, compared to $0.119. Both databases consisted of potential customers who’d shown interest in Gymwrap’s products, meaning the difference came down to platform performance.

Gymwrap's first full SMS campaign through Mailchimp generated a 142x return on investment, establishing SMS as a critical channel rather than experimental.

And the unified platform delivered the consistent performance Hume had been chasing. Mailchimp now consistently contributes 30% of Gymwrap's total attributed revenue, hitting what the brand considers its "gold standard" for marketing effectiveness.

Consolidating platforms also eliminated $100 in monthly redundant fees, but the bigger operational win was having a single source of truth for customer data. Hume no longer guesses which customers are engaged.

The marketing automation flows generate revenue continuously in the background with no manual campaign execution required, freeing the team to focus on strategy. Meanwhile, hands-on customer success support helped Gymwrap avoid hiring additional marketing staff by providing guidance and technical resources on demand.

"I had been an advocate for Klaviyo, but this experience has converted me back to Mailchimp," Hume says. "Unlike other platforms where you're one of 25 brands in a monthly office hour, Mailchimp provides a true one-to-one customer success model that has exceeded our expectations."

The team is also implementing vanity codes for SMS, allowing Nicole to promote "text GYMWRAP" during interviews and appearances rather than trying to share a phone number. 

It's another way the brand is making their marketing work smarter across every touchpoint.

"Mailchimp has been a true partner in building our capacity to grow today and prepare for the future," Hume says. "We've seen definitive growth across multiple channels, and the quickness of the response rate we're seeing with SMS has been an incredible ‘aha!’ moment for the brand."