Lily didn’t set out to launch a clothing brand for the sake of fashion. The idea came from a daily frustration she couldn’t ignore.
While working full-time in electric vehicle infrastructure, Lily found herself constantly battling pet hair.
“I work in electric vehicle infrastructure. It’s a nice eight-to-five, Monday through Friday. I have three dogs, and I was always just covered in fur all the time,” she explains.
The problem was simple, persistent, and personal.
“I pretty much thought to myself, how could I make clothes where the hair just doesn’t stick — or I could easily wipe it away?”
That question became the foundation of her brand. Lily began developing custom fabric designed to resist pet hair, committing to a process that would take far longer than a typical apparel launch.
“It’s been like over a year-long work in progress trying to find the right manufacturer because my clothes are made with the custom fabric,” she says.
Throughout that period, she chose to build in public, sharing the process openly as it unfolded.
“I was building in public, I put my idea out on TikTok, and it pretty much started going viral.”
What followed validated the demand she suspected was there all along. When her first drop went live, the response was immediate.
“When a drop came, I sold out in a couple of hours,” Lily recalls.
The challenge quickly shifted from proving interest to managing it — all while continuing to work a full-time job.
Learning Email Marketing From Scratch
As Lily moved closer to launch, she faced a new challenge beyond fabric and manufacturing: learning email marketing from the ground up while working full-time.
“Basically. I’m very new to email marketing,” she explains.
With a demanding Monday-to-Friday role, time was her biggest constraint.
“I needed something that was going to be easy enough for me to learn — something intuitive enough where I wouldn’t have to pour way too much time into it.”
She initially started with Klaviyo, intending to set up emails and automations herself.
“I started with Klaviyo first. Let me get on here, start making emails, and start doing my automations,” she says.
But instead of clarity, the process became circular.
“I was kind of going in circles with it, and things weren’t looking like how I wanted them to look.”
As her audience grew, the frustration compounded.
“I felt like I was being punished for growing.”
That experience led her to switch to Omnisend — and the difference was immediate.
“That’s honestly how I felt when I made the switch to Omnisend, it was a lot easier to use,” Lily explains.
She moved quickly without overthinking the setup.
“I was able to pop all my automations together really quickly, and then things were also looking like how I wanted them to look.”
For a founder balancing a full-time job alongside a launch, that simplicity mattered. Omnisend helped Lily put essential systems in place without taking focus away from everything else she was building.
How Lily Uses Omnisend Day-to-Day
Day to day, Lily relies on Omnisend to keep customer communication running without demanding constant attention. With a full-time job and multiple priorities, the platform is something she can set up and trust.
“I’m glad I can just put it on and leave it so I don’t worry about it,” she explains, describing how email and SMS can run in the background once everything is in place.
Rather than managing campaigns manually, Lily uses Omnisend to support early access and launch coordination through straightforward automation. That hands-off structure is what allows Omnisend to fit into her routine.
Instead of pulling focus away from product development or fulfillment, her customer communication runs reliably in the background — helping her manage demand while balancing everything else.
The Impact Lily Is Seeing
For Lily, the impact of Omnisend shows up most clearly at launch. By building her audience ahead of time, she was able to start selling with demand already in place.
“I was around 3,000 when I launched,” she explains.
From there, growth continued as the brand moved out of development and into active drops.
Also, that audience wasn’t passive. Lily used email and SMS to coordinate exactly when — and how — customers could access each release.
“I had everyone just sitting on that email list, waiting for their text or the email for the launch date, the time, everything,” she says, describing how anticipation built before products went live.
Reflecting on the launch as a whole, Lily is clear about the role the platform played in turning preparation into results.
“Omnisend has been a big part of my launch,” she says, describing it as “definitely a major tool when it came to the early success of my brand.”
How Foundr Students Are Using Omnisend in Real Businesses
Lily’s experience reflects a broader reality for many Foundr students building businesses alongside full-time jobs. With limited time, energy, and margin for error, they need systems that are quick to learn, easy to implement, and reliable when it matters most.
Rather than treating email and SMS as separate, complex disciplines, founders like Lily integrate them directly into their launch process. By setting up essential automations early, they can build audiences in advance, coordinate demand, and manage access — without constant hands-on work.
That structure frees them up to focus on product development and fulfilment, while customer communication keeps running in the background.
If you want to build similar campaigns without doubling your workload, Omnisend makes it practical.Foundr readers can also get 50% off their first three months — use code FOUNDR50 when you sign up, and start creating emails that not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations.
