Why don’t brushes get a restock email?
I sell art supplies. Around fifteen thousand of them, to artists all over India.
Order placedAbout six weeks later:we check inBrushes only:
we stay quiet
There’s paint in the order, so we check in about six weeks later.
{%- assign type = "durable" -%}
{%- for item in order.items -%}
{%- for cat in item.categories -%}
{%- assign c = cat | downcase -%}
{%- if c contains "brush"
or c contains "easel"
or c contains "painting tools"
or c contains "palette"
or c contains "accessor" -%}
{%- continue -%}
{%- endif -%}
{%- if c contains "paint"
or c contains "paper"
or c contains "ink"
or c contains "pastel"
or c contains "sketchbook"
or c contains "canvas" -%}
{%- assign type =
"consumable" -%}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endfor -%}
{%- endfor -%}
{{ type }}
My team and I wanted every email we send to feel helpful rather than intrusive. That meant making them a bit smarter with Liquid, the small bits of code Bento lets you write inside its flows and emails.
On this site I’ll show you how each journey works and why I set it up that way. Borrow whatever fits your own store.
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How does the restock email decide?
A good brush can last you years. A tube of paint, if you are painting actively, might be gone in a few weeks.
So when an order comes in, a few lines of Liquid check what was in it. If it was only brushes, we skip the restock reminder entirely. If there was paint or paper in the order, we check in about six weeks later.
Nobody should get an email asking them to replace a brush that still has years of painting left in it.
What does lifecycle email mean to me?
Most stores email everyone the same thing at the same time. A sale goes out, and the artist who bought a full set of oils yesterday gets the same message as someone who has never ordered.
I wanted the opposite. Each email should arrive because of something a customer actually did: they signed up, left a cart, received a parcel, or started running low on paint.
Before setting any timings, my team and I looked at our own orders. Most second orders come within weeks, not months, so our emails show up while someone is still in the middle of a project.
Fun fact- Bento’s date trigger never fired for us.
That’s the setting meant to start a flow on a particular date, and not a single person ever entered ours. So we built a small clock that lives outside Bento. Every morning it sends Bento a little signal, and our flows start from that instead.
It has run reliably ever since. If your date trigger ever goes quiet, you can set up the same thing.
Want to build journeys like these?
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