Bogg Bag has sold more than 7 million of its signature beach bags and built a loyal, highly organic social following. Alicia Barreto, who leads lifecycle marketing at Bogg Bag, has been with the company for a little over a year and a half, managing email and SMS as a self-described “resident in-house data nerd.”

Alicia and her team worked with Cloudinary to help develop its new integration with Klaviyo, which brings fully designed, on-brand personalized imagery into email. At K:BOS, Klaviyo’s user conference in Boston, she sat down with Bridget Roman, senior director of product marketing at Cloudinary, for a session called “Protect the Vision, Simplify the Execution” to talk through how that collaboration came together and where the program goes next. Here’s where it stands today.

Bogg Bag at a glance:

19% increase in engagement on Bogg Bag’s first personalized campaign, after about three weeks live
Under 5 minutes to turn a Figma design into a working Klaviyo email — a process that used to take about a week
2.5-person creative team (one head of lifecycle, one full-time designer/head of creative, one contractor) supporting the whole program
80%+ of Bogg Bag’s customers open email on mobile
7 million+ Bogg Bags sold since launch

Note:

The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Bogg Bag was founded in 2008 by Kim Vaccarella, who came up with the idea for a durable, tip-proof beach bag after struggling to find one during frequent trips to the Jersey Shore.

Inspired by the lightweight, washable EVA foam used in her kids’ Crocs, she was relentless about bringing Bogg to life through sketches, patents, and prototypes.

By 2016, word of mouth and grassroots social media marketing helped the brand cross $1 million in annual revenue, and it later became a viral sensation on TikTok and Instagram. Today, Bogg Bag is a $100 million business sold in more than 9,500 stores nationwide, including Target, Nordstrom, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Bridget: Today, we’re discussing personalizing what we consider the last unpersonalized surface. Klaviyo is great at personalizing the message — when a customer should receive it based on where they are in the lifecycle, and the copy. But the image, the thing a customer looks at first, is often the hardest thing to personalize. How does that resonate with you, Alicia?

Alicia: For us, it’s always been really manual: working with your creative team — sometimes causing tension — because you’re trying to fit into the platform’s limitations versus what they’re trying to execute. They’re trying to put something really beautiful together, really protect your brand and your story, but sometimes it falls apart because the platform can’t handle it. I hopped on a call with one of Cloudinary’s engineers — our head of creative told me to go check it out — and we solved this in literally five minutes, which was pretty incredible.

[The creative team] is trying to put something really beautiful together, really protect your brand and your story, but sometimes it falls apart because the platform can’t handle it. I hopped on a call with one of Cloudinary’s engineers — our head of creative told me to go check it out — and we solved this in literally five minutes, which was pretty incredible.

[The creative team] is trying to put something really beautiful together, really protect your brand and your story, but sometimes it falls apart because the platform can’t handle it. I hopped on a call with one of Cloudinary’s engineers — our head of creative told me to go check it out — and we solved this in literally five minutes, which was pretty incredible.Alicia Barreto, Director of CRM and Retention, Bogg Bag

Educating our creative team on grid structures, custom fonts, and how things render in inboxes is a lot of overload for someone who just wants to hand off a beautiful image. [Cloudinary] has been a game changer in taking that load off their plate. My biggest piece of advice is that you don’t have to go sky high and complex. Start simple and have a use case. Prove this out to yourself and your team first.

Bridget: Your company has been using Cloudinary for just over a year, starting with our Shopify integration to automatically crop images for product and category pages. It sounds like the question then became, “Why can’t I use this for email imagery?”

Alicia: I inherited a program that ran through many agency partners and needed a lot of cleanup. The real estate you have on email is so precious now — more than 80% of our customers are opening on and shopping on mobile — and now, with AI summaries, that real estate is shrinking. We don’t have a lot of space to catch their eye and tell a story.

We were seeing our product images come through in email with a lot of white space, so customers had to scroll to see the actual product. By then, you’ve already missed a huge opportunity. Those details matter. Those first few seconds they open, they want to see something visual, and that has a major impact.

So our question was, instead of having our team go through and manipulate every single image, a custom crop for everything just for email, could we do this with Cloudinary?

I connected with Cloudinary and we were able to wrap all of our images in custom transformations that actually push our images up higher and eliminate that white space, automated across everything. That was a huge unlock for us, and it helped increase our engagement rates pretty massively across all of our programs. It’s a small detail you might not see in initial revenue, but if you let those flows run and get some power behind them, it has a huge impact. Those visuals really matter.

Bridget: I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone, but I wanted to share some interesting data points coming from McKinsey and Twilio about the power of personalization. It has been shown to increase customer spend for 75% of businesses, as well as boost revenue by 5-15% and ROI on marketing spend by 10-30%. Any comments on that as a retention driver at your company?

Alicia: It’s such a transformative process for us. For years we’ve been hearing buzzwords about being more personalized, more one-to-one, but that’s really difficult to execute, especially as your company scales and you’re trying to manage this across a huge data architecture that will get messy. This is really helping us automate on a larger scale. Now I think we’re entering an era — with tools like Cloudinary — of true one-to-one continuous optimization. It’s personalized to that singular customer.

Now I think we’re entering an era — with tools like Cloudinary — of true one-to-one continuous optimization. It’s personalized to that singular customer.Alicia Barreto, Director of CRM and Retention, Bogg Bag

Now I think we’re entering an era — with tools like Cloudinary — of true one-to-one continuous optimization. It’s personalized to that singular customer.

Bridget: Let’s talk about the challenge you started with — you lead a super-lean team.

Alicia: Yes, and our full-time designer is also our head of creative, which happens often at smaller retail brands. You’re not working with a team of 10 designers. That would be an amazing dream. I’d love to get there. But with that, bandwidth is hard.

They’re not only making assets. Your email asset is one priority. But they have to get all the site assets and do a lifecycle photo shoot. They have so many other things on their plate, so time is critical, and also that relationship — that trust with your creative and lifecycle — is important, too.

Bridget: What was the lifecycle marketing team doing before Cloudinary, when it came to managing images in your program?

Alicia: I walked into Bogg Bag and there was something like 10 different links to Air, 15 WeTransfer links, and maybe a Google Sheet you’d have to download a snapshot from. You have to build velocity from that — a sense of organization and process helps smooth things out and get them rolling a little quicker.

Our head of creative had used Cloudinary in a past role and brought it in so that instead of our team manually cropping a new bag design every two weeks, we could automate it. So I got curious: could we apply that same idea downstream into Klaviyo, since it’s all fundamentally just image links?Alicia Barreto, Director of CRM and Retention, Bogg Bag

Our head of creative had used Cloudinary in a past role and brought it in so that instead of our team manually cropping a new bag design every two weeks, we could automate it. So I got curious: could we apply that same idea downstream into Klaviyo, since it’s all fundamentally just image links?

Bridget: Do you want to talk about design fidelity, such as custom fonts, things designers care about that you weren’t able to translate from a Figma file?

Alicia: That’s always been a point with designers for my whole career, not just Bogg Bag. Your creative team is already overloaded with what they have to deliver, and on top of that you’re asking them to absorb platform limitations. You should be able to take that off their plate. That’s what Cloudinary has helped us do. We don’t have to limit the scope of their design ideas.

Your creative team is already overloaded with what they have to deliver, and on top of that you’re asking them to absorb platform limitations. You should be able to take that off their plate. That’s what Cloudinary has helped us do. We don’t have to limit the scope of their design ideas.

Things like custom fonts in email. We come across that a lot. I’ve been in luxury retail, and that curation, that vision, is key to the brand and to what customers feel loyal to.

But it’s hard to maintain — a custom web font might not render across Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. So we wanted to start small with Cloudinary rather than having our designers’ vision fully break down once it hit the inbox.

Bridget: You told us you’ve been waiting for this functionality for 10 years. What were you waiting for?

Alicia: When I started in lifecycle, I didn’t know much about HTML’s limitations — I’d ask, why can’t you make this one letter clickable, or this one product clickable floating in free space? And the answer was, “That’s just not how it works.” But I kept pushing and asking. We make it work, so we make it work in email format? This is so major for us. We build these beautiful layers into our designs, and that’s really what Cloudinary is helping us serve.

Bridget: Let’s talk about the first Cloudinary and Bogg Bag execution: a birthday loyalty campaign.

Alicia: Our head of creative told me Cloudinary was working on this plugin and suggested I go have a chat. I got on a call, and I brought an example I’d been told I couldn’t do: candy-striped lines behind text, which for me is an image, not a plain color I can inject into a template. We took a design we already had. I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, since we’re tiny and don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to try and prove it to my team.

This particular image had elements like expiration date going across those candy-striped lines, but that’s an image. That’s really hard to execute in Klaviyo or in any ESP. But with Cloudinary, I was able to take this into Figma, and in less than five minutes, I had a working email in Klaviyo.

That would have taken me a week longer to self-code, cut, and slice. We’re starting small as a concept, but there’s a lot of layering we want to do — how we take this with our products, make it modular, and move away from flat recommendations toward what I like to call the “dressed-up Bogg Bag.”

Bridget: You said this took about five minutes to put together, and it only launched a few weeks ago. How are your metrics so far?

Alicia: It’s only been about three weeks, and we’re already seeing a 19% increase in engagement — and I was able to move elements up and completely preserve exactly what my creative team had built. The example might be simple, but it’s about how we push this into dynamic, even infinite imagery optimizations, while preserving the layers our creative team already built in Photoshop and Figma.

It’s only been about three weeks, and we’re already seeing a 19% increase in engagement — and I was able to move elements up and completely preserve exactly what my creative team had built.Alicia Barreto, Director of CRM and Retention, Bogg Bag

It’s only been about three weeks, and we’re already seeing a 19% increase in engagement — and I was able to move elements up and completely preserve exactly what my creative team had built.

Bridget: I like how you’re saying you started small and manageable. Where you’re headed next, though, is adding things like a first name, and even dynamic promo codes, to your email images.

Alicia: That was something I tested with our Cloudinary contact. We do a lot of coupons in downstream flows, and I asked if we could get that into an image. It’s so important to have a partner that works hand-in-hand to develop the product with you, who’s just as curious as you. You’re going to fail and get errors, but it’s so satisfying to work with someone willing to help you get to that next level.

It’s so important to have a partner that works hand-in-hand to develop the product with you, who’s just as curious as you. You’re going to fail and get errors, but it’s so satisfying to work with someone willing to help you get to that next level.Alicia Barreto, Director of CRM and Retention, Bogg Bag

It’s so important to have a partner that works hand-in-hand to develop the product with you, who’s just as curious as you. You’re going to fail and get errors, but it’s so satisfying to work with someone willing to help you get to that next level.

We have a huge Halloween collection, and we have an asset with an image set behind some candy. Being able to showcase this without having to create four variants, and four different images for my creative team is awesome. I can just automate it out.

The other piece is evangelizing to your creative team what’s available so you’re not limiting their ideas. You need to let them know, yes, you can use a first name, or, I have elements of last item they purchased and a predictive engine for the accessories that will match. How do we pair that up together? That way they know what’s possible to help them win customers.

Bridget: Alicia, what are your three pieces of advice on getting started with personalization and working with vendors?

Alicia: First, really vet your partners. Work with people who want to work hand-in-hand with you, not just make you fit their platform. Your use case is probably not just for your business; it’s for a lot of others.

Second, take an hour every week to discover and play with the tools you have. Protect that time. Some weeks you’ll be frustrated the whole hour, but you might have your next “aha” moment after you walk away.

Your data architecture is so major. Be protective of it, because these AI tools are starting to feed off that information, and it all starts from your data. And third: Get a ton of error messages. It’s the best way to learn. You fall down a little and start asking more questions.

Third, start small and be iterative. Don’t try to perfect everything on day one. Start with one focused use case, learn through doing, and add sophistication over time. That’s what we did with Bogg: we began conservatively with the birthday campaign, saw encouraging results, and now have a foundation to explore what comes next.

See how the Cloudinary + Klaviyo integration can bring designed, personalized imagery to your own email campaigns in minutes.