Our team made it to Boston last week for Klaviyo’s flagship global customer conference, K:BOS, held annually at the Hynes Convention Center. Marketers, operators, and brand builders from across the B2C space descended on New England to hear the latest in the ever-evolving world of Klaviyo. The two-day program covered four tracks: AI, Service, Marketing, and Platform, with supporting keynotes, customer panels, and hands-on workshops.
Two threads from this year’s event stand out for how brands should think about retention and revenue right now: what makes creator-led brands work, and where Klaviyo is taking customer service as a growth channel. We sent a team to the event, and here’s what stood out.
Creators Turned Founders: What Actually Builds Trust
A Klaviyo executive sat down with two creators who became founders: Funmi Monet, who launched a fragrance brand through Sephora’s Accelerate program, and Preston Konrad, a home lifestyle creator and founder of Preston Lane. Both built brands on the back of an existing paid social audience. Both learned quickly that an audience and a customer base are not the same thing.
The Content That Surprised Them
Preston’s highest-performing content wasn’t polished product marketing. It was “thrill of the hunt” footage, thrifting and sourcing runs, and building-in-public content, including livestreams from the lab on products still two years from launch. Funmi’s lesson ran in the opposite direction: fragrance itself was the novel format. Beauty content had been built around what’s visually demonstrable: hair, makeup, skincare. Building attention around something intangible took building a new lane from scratch.
Audience and Customer Are Overlapping, Not Identical Pools
Both speakers agreed that a content audience opts into a point of view, while a customer opts into a promise. That distinction matters at scale. An existing audience gets a founder to launch, but it saturates. Growth past that point means earning trust with people who have never seen a single post.
DMs as an Operations Channel
Both run meaningful parts of their businesses through direct messages. Preston caught a shipping partner problem early because customers flagged it in his community before it hit support tickets. Funmi traced a defective batch, a faulty trigger pump, back to a specific production run using nothing but Instagram DMs. As both brands scale, the plan is to stay personally present in DMs and comments, blend personal and brand account content, and use tools that surface and reward superfans rather than manually tracking every mention.
What Creator Partnerships Look Like Post-Founder
Preston treats every paid partnership as a withdrawal from a trust account, and he protects it by only working with brands that reinforce his expert persona. Funmi said becoming a founder sharpened how her own audience judges her partnership choices, so she declines anything that doesn’t match her actual lifestyle. Her cautionary tale: a brand once pushed her to change her nails on camera, and the response from the audience was entirely about the nails, with none of it about the product itself.
The shared advice for marketers: let creators translate a brand’s truth instead of over-scripting it. An EOS campaign that used a more casual, Cardi B-approved script outperformed the polished version, and a Klaviyo brand tested a version without a forced brand-name mention that beat the version with it.
AI for Efficiency, Not for Creativity
Both creators use AI for ad iteration and testing, packaging mockups before launch, and explaining unfamiliar business functions in plain terms. Neither uses it for core storytelling. Funmi raised a sharper point: AI still carries bias, and as a Black founder building a brand rooted in cultural relevancy, she’s wary of leaning on it for anything creative. Preston turned down the option to build an AI version of himself to scale content, despite the appeal.
Preston Lane’s exclusive Amazon home collection has sold out twice with reorders, and the brand is targeting retail shelf placement in 2027. Funmi’s brand sold out in six hours after launching through Sephora’s Accelerate program and is now expanding into stores.
Klaviyo’s 2027 Service Roadmap: Turning Support Into Revenue
The event’s second major focus reframed customer service entirely. Klaviyo’s pitch: service has traditionally been treated as a cost center: resolve the ticket, close it out, move on. Every service interaction is also a purchase signal, a churn risk, or a relationship-building moment, and Customer Agent is positioned to make service a revenue channel, not just a support one.
From Conversation to Action
When Customer Agent launched at last year’s K: BOS, it could hold a personalized conversation using brand knowledge and Klaviyo data. It can now take real actions, modifying subscriptions, processing returns, and booking reservations, across tools brands already use like Shopify and Loop Returns. It runs across chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and now voice, in more than 100 languages.
Three configurable pillars define how it works:
- What it knows — a brand knowledge base preloaded from the storefront, tunable to define what it should and shouldn’t reference
- How it acts — customizable skills plus connectors that let it take real actions in external systems
- Who it is — brand voice and tone guidance so responses sound like the brand, not a generic bot
Reported results included over $120K in new service-driven revenue for Harney & Sons, 48% of e-commerce revenue attributed to Klaviyo in 2025 for Naked Wardrobe, and full resolution of return and exchange requests by Customer Agent for another brand.
Three Demos Worth Noting
A return request for Core Power Yoga turned into an exchange instead of a refund. The agent pulled the customer’s order from Shopify, recognized the actual issue was fit rather than dissatisfaction, asked for details and a photo, matched it against the catalog, and completed the exchange without a human handoff. The preference data gets written back to the customer’s Klaviyo profile, making the next marketing email more relevant.
An abandoned-cart SMS reply asking about sizing and a discount code turned into a recovered sale. The agent answered from reviews and size charts, located the discount code, and generated a new checkout link on the spot.
A restaurant reservation call showed the newest channel: voice. The agent recognized the caller by phone number, pulled her Klaviyo profile, checked availability, booked the table, and noted it was her anniversary, information that gets written back for next year’s personalization.
Setup Without the Prompt Engineering
Customer Agent arrives pre-trained on existing Klaviyo and Shopify data, auto-configuring around a brand’s most common customer questions. Teams can review simulated conversations before going live. Composer, Klaviyo’s AI agent-builder tool, lets teams describe desired behavior in plain language to adjust the agent instead of hand-writing prompts.
The Bigger Picture
Klaviyo’s social capabilities and Composer were the standout themes of the event, alongside a recurring message that AI is meant to free up human creativity rather than replace it. Klaviyo is no longer just an email platform. It’s now email, SMS, a CRM, a review platform, and increasingly a customer service and social attribution engine. The personalization opportunities that come with all of that connected data are significant, and worth watching closely heading into 2027.
Want help putting Klaviyo’s full feature set to work for your brand? Explore our email marketing services, see what SMS marketing can add to your retention strategy, or learn more about our Klaviyo partnership.
