Ecommerce - Fashion
True Classic
True Classic is a fast-growing digital brand that scaled into a multi-hundred-million-dollar e-commerce powerhouse in just a few years. Discover how MailSoar fixes Gmail spam placement and a Microsoft block on Klaviyo.
Talk to a deliverability expert See more case studiesInbox Placement
Unique open rate
True Classic is a fast-growing, digital-native apparel brand that scaled from a $3,000 startup in 2019 to a multi-hundred-million-dollar e-commerce powerhouse. That growth trajectory is a textbook B2C scale-up profile: rapid customer acquisition, aggressive email-driven revenue targets, and a subscriber base expanding far faster than most brands' sending infrastructure can handle.
- Industry
Ecommerce - Fashion - B2C - High Growth Scale-Up.
- Challenge
Lack of segmentation, poorly acquired subscribers, no deliverability tracking, Microsoft block, Gmail spam placement.
- Solution
Full audit and action plan, MSFT block mitigation, subdomain and list cleaning, ongoing segmentation to recover reputation.
- Outcome
Open rate improved from under 20% to 45%+;
Volume scaled 40x over subsequent years;
no major deliverability incident since.- Duration
18 months.
200M+ emails / month
Inbox Placement
Unique open rate
IP / Domain reputation
True Classic is a fast-growing digital brand that scaled to a multi-hundred-million-dollar e-commerce powerhouse in a few years. That growth trajectory is a textbook B2C scale-up profile: rapid customer acquisition, aggressive email-driven revenue targets, and a subscriber base expanding far faster than most brands' sending infrastructure can handle.
True Classic approached MailSoar with a severe deliverability issue: a high bounce rate due to Microsoft blocking their emails and a low open rate as Gmail routed their traffic to spam.
At the time of this engagement, True Classic was sending on Klaviyo at very high volume (200M+ emails/month) — a scale at which even small reputation or list-quality issues get amplified across the entire mailbox-provider ecosystem.
True Classic's case is a bad sender reputation at scale, driven by list-quality and monitoring gaps rather than a single technical misconfiguration:
• Lack of segmentation: campaigns were not adequately segmented by engagement, so unengaged or risky segments dragged down performance for the whole sending domain.
• Poorly acquired subscribers via third-party channels: a meaningful share of the list came from lower-quality, non-native acquisition sources — a classic list-hygiene risk factor that inflates spam complaints and disengagement.
• No deliverability tracking: without ongoing monitoring, early warning signs (rising complaint rates, provider-specific delivery drops) went unnoticed until they became a full-blown block.
Microsoft (MSFT) blocking: the accumulated reputation damage escalated into an outright block at Microsoft, driving a high bounce rate.
• Gmail spam placement: in parallel, Gmail routed the bulk of True Classic's traffic to the spam folder, collapsing open rates.
MailSoar ran a structured recovery plan, resolving the block and spam placements within weeks and putting True Classic back on track to hit its marketing goals.
Beyond fixing the block, email became a dependable growth engine again at massive scale: True Classic scaled sending volume more than 40x in the years since, without a single major deliverability incident, while open rates held at roughly 3x their pre-engagement level. That reliability gave the brand the confidence to keep investing in email as it expanded into physical retail and wholesale.
What we did
How MailSoar has helped this eCommerce brand fix deliverability at scale
In 4 steps
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Audit and 3-month action plan
Full deliverability audit presented to True Classic's management team, who signed off on a 3-month implementation plan covering a new sending subdomain, list cleaning, Microsoft block mitigation, and a segmentation strategy to rebuild reputation.
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Execution with tight feedback loops
Rollout of the plan with biweekly strategy meetings and daily Slack communication, so issues surfaced and were resolved in near real time.
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Recovery and controlled scale-up
Deliverability recovered within the first few weeks; volumes were then ramped back to pre-incident levels and beyond, while sustaining roughly 3x the pre-engagement open rate.
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Long-term deliverability partnership
Ongoing collaboration over several years to maintain deliverability, support True Classic's email marketing goals, and keep the domain compliant with current standards like BIMI and Apple Verified Mail.
MailSoar had a huge impact on our business and I highly recommend them. They helped us grow our open rate from ~10% to almost 50% for our eCommerce store by optimizing our email strategy and implementing various deliverability tactics. We have been using their service for a few months now, and I couldn't be happier with their knowledge, expertise, and great communication.
The results
Recovering from the Microsoft block and Gmail spam placement reshaped every core deliverability metric for this high-volume eCommerce sender.
Frequently asked
Can a high-volume eCommerce sender recover from a Microsoft block without losing revenue long-term?
Yes — with a structured recovery plan (subdomain migration, list cleaning, targeted mitigation, and rebuilt segmentation), a blocked or spam-flagged sender can restore inbox placement within weeks. True Classic recovered from a Microsoft block and Gmail spam placement in about 3 months, then scaled sending volume more than 40x in the following years without another major incident.
