Customer Story
The Obvi-ous move: How a $100M brand unlocked the repeat revenue hiding outside its subscription program
Obvi has turned collagen into one of DTC's great growth stories, scaling past $100M in five years on the strength of products people love, a community that acts more like a fandom, and a constant stream of new flavors and formats that give customers a reason to come back. Repeat orders aren't just a metric at Obvi. They're the lifeblood of the business.
Obvi invests heavily in its subscription program, and it shows. But no brand converts every repeat buyer into a subscriber, and Obvi knew a meaningful share of its reorders came from customers who buy on their own terms. To capture that segment consistently, Obvi partnered with rePete® by Bold, an AI reorder agent that learns each customer's unique buying pace and nudges them to reorder at exactly the right moment.
The challenge
Obvi's repeat business had two very different audiences being treated the same way. Subscribers had already committed; they mostly needed patience and flexibility. One-time and lapsed buyers needed well-timed encouragement to come back. Running one global outreach strategy across both meant Obvi was too aggressive with loyal subscribers and not aggressive enough with the one-time and lapsed buyers who were quietly slipping away.
Underneath it all sat a trickier problem: Obvi had no way of knowing when a customer was actually finishing their product. Outreach went out when it was convenient for the brand to assume the customer was done, not when the customer was actually ready to buy.
"We never really considered when somebody was finishing their product. We just assumed we knew, and that's when we'd ask them to buy. We never flipped it and asked: is it convenient for you yet? Are you ready?"
The strategy
To reach the repeat buyers its subscription program was never built to capture, Obvi turned on rePete®'s reorder predictions. Instead of relying on a fixed calendar, rePete® learns each individual customer's buying rhythm and builds a reorder prediction for every customer and every product. When the timing is right, a friendly nudge goes out by email, SMS, on-site, or push. The timing, the message, and the channel all adapt to each customer, and every reorder makes the next prediction smarter.
Obvi also put rePete®'s Smart Cart to work. When a customer clicks a nudge to confirm their reorder, Smart Cart suggests the perfect add-on to go with it, turning a simple restock into a larger basket. For a brand that launches new products as often as Obvi does, every drop gets a warm, perfectly timed audience.
Critically, none of this touches Obvi's subscribers. rePete® works exclusively with the customers outside the subscription program, so every reorder it drives is purely additive. Setup took about twenty minutes on a single call, and rePete®'s first reorder predictions were live within 24 hours.
"What sold me was simple: if it doesn't do anything, you don't pay anything. We're all spending a lot of money on a lot of tools right now. We need everything to work."
The results
rePete® was built around three goals for any merchant: turn one-time buyers into repeat customers, get repeat customers reordering more often, and get them spending more when they do. Obvi is already seeing results on all three.
On the return: rePete® Reorders + Replenish Reminders for Shopify has driven a 36X ROI for Obvi, without spending a dollar to acquire a new customer. And on order economics: reorders through rePete® carry a 28% higher average order value than Obvi's other reorders, and customers who reorder through rePete® generate 13% higher revenue per customer than Obvi's other repeat buyers.
rePete® is also already responsible for 6% of all of Obvi's repeat purchase revenue, and climbing, flowing through a channel that didn't exist before. Smart Cart has upsized nearly a third of those reorders (32%), pairing each one with the right add-on at the right moment.
And through all of it, Obvi's subscription program is exactly as strong as it was before. rePete® didn't move a single subscriber. It found the repeat revenue that was going uncaptured. As Ron puts it, one of the biggest unlocks Obvi has found had nothing to do with ads or subscriptions. It was capturing the repeat revenue they didn't even know they were leaving on the table.
"We scaled Obvi to $100M. rePete® is the tool I wish we had from day one."
— Ronak Shah, Co-Founder & CEO, Obvi