Case Study
Vertex Retail Group — the turnaround.
A heritage retailer with great product and fading relevance rebuilt its growth engine around retention and personalization — lifting retention 31 points in one year.
0 pts
Repeat purchase rate
in 12 months
0.0x
Returning revenue
growth
-0%
Acquisition spend
reallocated to retention
0 pts
Gross margin
via pricing portfolio
The engagement
Inside the work.
The same sequence every time — diagnose, design, deliver, prove.
01 — The Challenge
The Challenge
Vertex had 40 years of customer trust and a static brand: same products, same experience, declining visit frequency. Acquisition costs had tripled in two years as performance-marketing rates climbed — and the data team spent 80% of its time just producing monthly reports.
The board's instinct was a bigger marketing budget. The numbers said otherwise: the brand's opportunity was in bringing customers back, not buying new ones.
02 — The Strategy
The Strategy
We reframed growth around customer lifetime value: a unified customer data platform, segment-specific retention playbooks, and a personalization layer across web, email and store. Pricing experiments were structured as a disciplined test portfolio rather than intuition-driven discounts.
The CFO and CMO aligned on one north-star metric — repeat purchase rate — replacing the channel-level metrics that had been fighting each other.
03 — The Execution
The Execution
The CDP went live in eleven weeks on a modern stack, wiring together commerce, POS, loyalty and email. Retention playbooks shipped in quarterly waves, each measured against holdout groups so incrementality was provable.
Store associates received guided CRM tools, turning 400 physical locations into personalization assets rather than blind spots.
04 — The Results
The Results
Repeat purchase rate moved 31 points in a year. Revenue from returning customers grew 2.1x while acquisition spend was cut 25%. The pricing portfolio added 4 margin points with zero share loss. The board's growth case is now built on data Vertex produces itself.
Timeline
How the work unfolded.
The engagement, phase by phase — funded by the savings it created.
CDP build
Weeks 1–11
Customer data platform live.
Retention wave 1–2
Quarters 2–3
Playbooks shipped with holdout measurement.
Pricing portfolio
Quarter 3
Test-driven pricing, +4 pts margin.
Store enablement
Quarter 4
Guided CRM in 400 locations.
As a founder, I needed someone who thinks like an operator, not a vendor. Their growth team moved our retention 31 points in a single year.
Rahul Mehta
Founder & CEO, Vertex Retail Group
Related expertise
Where we apply this.
The capabilities behind this engagement, available across every industry we serve.