An "Excellent"-rated email account, by Klaviyo's own benchmark
Chipex sells car paint-chip repair kits. The email account behind it runs a 64.42% average open rate, Klaviyo's own benchmark calls that "Excellent" for the category.
The situation
Chipex sells a specific, considered-purchase product: DIY paint chip repair kits, sold direct to car owners who care enough about their car's finish to fix it themselves rather than pay a body shop. That's a loyal, repeat-purchase audience once they trust the product, which makes email a genuinely high-leverage channel for this brand rather than a background one.
The account's actual challenge wasn't building an audience from nothing, it already had one. It was avoiding the trap a lot of niche DIY brands fall into: talking to subscribers like they're new every time, instead of like people who already own the product and just need the next reason to open the email. Someone who bought a kit eight months ago doesn't need to be re-convinced paint chips are annoying, they need a specific, well-timed reason this particular email is worth their time.
Average open rate across the account, Klaviyo's own benchmark rates this "Excellent."
Open rate on the best-performing individual Black Friday send in the account.
Why the open rate holds up this well
A 64% average across an entire account, not a single standout send, usually comes down to three unglamorous things done consistently rather than one clever campaign: list hygiene (not emailing people who've stopped opening, which protects deliverability for everyone else on the list), subject lines written for this specific audience rather than generic urgency ("your car" language outperforms "your order" language here), and a send cadence matched to how often this audience actually thinks about their car's paintwork, which is less often than a typical DTC brand assumes.
The Black Friday period is where all three compound. Sending too early or too often during that window is the fastest way to burn a list's goodwill for the rest of the year, so the calendar for Chipex's peak season was built around a small number of well-spaced, well-targeted sends rather than the daily-email approach a lot of e-commerce brands default to in Q4.
One of the sends
A VIP-framed Black Friday email, early access positioned as a reward for loyal customers rather than a generic sale blast, backed by real product reviews and the car-brand logos the kit is compatible with. The compatibility logos do more work than they look like they should: for a repair product, "does this actually work on my car" is the first objection, and answering it visually, before the reader has to ask, removes a reason to bounce before the offer even lands.
