Michael Kleinmann

Confusion about subscription add-ons is, in his words, a communication problem rather than a product problem, so the fix belongs in messaging and touchpoints.

• A warehouse that fails is a process to be corrected, not a relationship to be patched by complaining or threatening.
• Cancellations at a subscription brand were addressed by going into the workflow and rebuilding the education process.
• He summarises the habit as fixing the process, not the problem, and says most founders look at what went wrong while he looks at what it actually cost.

When a warehouse left outbound orders sitting for two weeks — it "didn't forecast.

• Didn't communicate." — he did not lean on the provider for a fix.
• He built a spreadsheet recording each issue, what it cost, its root cause and how the warehouse responded, then moved.

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Pull twelve months of invoices and capture every warehouse fee, freight charge, accessorial, return processing fee and inventory adjustment into a model of true cost per order, then add the hidden costs: staff hours spent managing the warehouse, shrinkage, and orders reshipped because of warehouse errors.

• Only once he has the current true cost and a target cost does he build the RFP.
• He argues most RFPs are worthless because they compare theoretical pricing that has nothing to do with how the business operates, and he models what the warehouse should cost given the brand's volume and complexity rather than shopping for the cheapest rate.

A client believed they were paying $7.50 per order. The analysis put the real figure at $11.25, with the warehouse absorbing margin through a thousand small fees.

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The clauses he says he writes every time: a storage cap tying costs to what the brand paid at its prior warehouse for equivalent inventory, because warehouses bill per cubic foot, per square foot or per pallet and quoted prices are not comparable until the first invoice lands; a defined inventory-accuracy threshold, because a warehouse can hit every other service level and still cost a fortune through wrong picks and mismatched records; written service levels for outbound shipping cut-off, inbound receiving window and returns processing days, on the basis that what is not in writing does not exist; and an exit clause that triggers a penalty-free exit when issues go unfixed after documented notice.

A client was stuck with a warehouse that shipped wrong items and had inventory out of control. Kleinmann documented every failure and escalated to senior management until the warehouse also wanted the relationship over; the cheapest exit he negotiated was paying hourly labour to pull pallets as fast as possible without counting them.

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It let a subscriber curate their next box, add a one-time item from the Shopify storefront to a box shipping weeks or months later, and stack a second subscription inside the same portal.

• He argues brands trying to copy it fail in four places: the offer is missing from touchpoints such as SMS, upcoming-shipment emails or the portal itself, so customers never learn it exists; the messaging implies the add-on ships every cycle rather than once; there is no discount, so there is no reason to add an item instead of buying it anywhere else; and the brand never tested enough to know what customers want to add.
• His selection rule is that the right add-on is lifestyle-adjacent and complementary — something the customer would buy anyway, now one click away while they are already reviewing their box.

The build allowed a customer with an underwear club subscription to add a supplement subscription on top of it inside the same portal, which he describes as subscription on top of subscription, with the aim that every renewal cycle becomes a revenue event.

Some consulting clients took a different route: manufacturing products made specifically to work only as a one-time add-on rather than drawing from the existing catalogue.

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He describes staying inside the details at Freshpair — driving inventory to the first warehouse in a rental car, answering customer service calls, doing the accounting, taking out the garbage — and ties that discipline to building with no safety net, no margin for waste and no resources to fall back on, explicitly not to a consulting firm or business school.

• His stated rule is that he does not advise on things he has not done and does not recommend anything he would not put his own money behind.
• He traces the pattern back to a high-school job at a small appliance store, where he set up the owner's first computer and inventory system.

With no marketing budget at Freshpair, he put models in underwear in Times Square and called it a national holiday, which he offers as an example of solving a problem with the resources at hand. The same post carries a quote from Brian Steixner, MD, co-founder and CEO of Popstar Labs, saying Kleinmann can accomplish anything he puts his mind to — an endorsement Kleinmann includes, not an independent record.

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He describes convincing brand chief executives one by one that their product should be on his website; most had never heard of the concept and many said no, and he says he built it anyway, assembling brand relationships, customer data and online infrastructure into something that had not existed before. His argument is that much of the industry followed once it could see the approach working, and that this was years of operator-level decisions made before anyone had a roadmap.

He points to men's underwear brands moving into online selling after watching his site succeed, rather than after being persuaded in advance. The same post quotes Ralph Beyda, president of 2(X)IST, calling Kleinmann a true visionary who redefined how brands market, sell and grow.

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If you are assessing Kleinmann for a retention or add-on brief, start here.

Kleinmann describes spending over $1M on custom software at Underwear Expert, built to plug into any subscription platform and later connected to Recharge.

• The build let a subscriber curate the next box, add a one-time item from the front end of Shopify to a box shipping weeks or months later, and stack a second subscription (a supplement club) on top of an existing underwear club.
• Kleinmann then names four recurring failures in brands that try to copy it: the add-on offer is not placed in every touch point (SMS, upcoming-shipment emails, the account portal) so customers never learn it exists; the messaging implies an add-on ships every cycle instead of once; there is no discount, so there is no reason to add an item rather than buy it elsewhere; and the brand does not know what customers want to add, which Kleinmann says only comes from testing and iteration.
• The add-on logic he describes is lifestyle-adjacent and complementary — something the customer would buy anyway, now available in one click while reviewing a box.
• Some consulting clients took a different route and manufactured products made only for the add-on program.

For brands planning a campaign

A brief on add-on revenue should cover offer placement across channels and the discount logic, not just the add-on product. The failure list is also a ready-made test plan: channel coverage, one-time-versus-recurring messaging, incentive, and demand testing.

Useful if a brief involves warehouse costs, or if you want to see how the advice is structured as steps rather than opinions.

Kleinmann's stated first step when a brand wants to change warehouses is not calling 3PLs but a financial teardown: pull twelve months of invoices and capture every warehouse fee, freight charge, accessorial, return processing fee, and inventory adjustment, then build a model of the true cost per order.

• On top of that he adds hidden costs — team hours spent managing warehouse issues, shrinkage, and reshipments caused by warehouse errors.
• One client believed they were paying $7.50 per order; the analysis put the real number at $11.25, with small fees absorbing the margin.
• The next step is modelling what the warehouse should cost given volume and complexity rather than shopping for the cheapest rate.
• He gives a reference case: a typical D2C brand doing 500 orders a day, 12oz orders, two units per order.
• Only after that does he build the RFP, and he argues most RFPs are worthless because they compare theoretical pricing that does not match how the business operates.

For brands planning a campaign

If a brand brief involves fulfilment cost, the analysis should be expected to start from the full invoice stack and internal labour, not the quoted per-order rate. The gap between quoted and true cost is a concrete content angle for a campaign.

It also shows how Kleinmann frames churn in cost terms.

Kleinmann describes a period when outbound orders sat for two weeks because the warehouse did not forecast or communicate, and says it could have put the company out of business.

• Instead of complaining or waiting, he built a spreadsheet documenting every issue: what the problem was, what it cost, the root cause, and how the warehouse responded.
• The costing went beyond obvious fees to include customer-service cost, the cost of a lost customer, and the lifetime revenue that left with them.
• With the full picture, the decision was to move, quickly.
• The mistake he names is failing to document, because without documentation a founder cannot calculate the cost and therefore cannot make the right call.
• He frames the first 30 days of a warehouse failure as building the case rather than repairing the relationship, and summarises the approach as fixing the process, not the problem.

For brands planning a campaign

For a retention brief, this treats fulfilment failure as quantifiable churn — lost customers and their lifetime revenue — rather than a service complaint. It supports an argument that operations quality and retention are the same budget line.

Kleinmann's premise is that most 3PL contracts are written to protect the warehouse, and that founders sign without knowing what is missing.

• His storage point: warehouses bill per cubic foot, per square foot, or per pallet, so quoted prices are not comparable until the first invoice arrives and doubles.
• The clause he says he writes every time caps storage costs at what the brand paid at its prior warehouse for equivalent inventory — warehouses agree to it but never volunteer it.
• He adds an inventory-accuracy clause with a defined threshold, because a warehouse can meet every other service level and still cost a fortune through wrong picks and mismatched inventory.
• Service levels must be written down: outbound shipping by a specific cutoff, inbound receiving inside a defined window, returns processed within a set number of days.
• The exit clause is the one he says nobody thinks about: issues left unfixed after documented notice should trigger a penalty-free exit.
• He illustrates with a client stuck with a warehouse that shipped wrong items and lost control of inventory; what helped was documenting every failure and escalating to senior management until the warehouse also wanted the relationship ended, and the cheapest exit was paying hourly labour to pull pallets as fast as possible without counting.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a brand evaluating logistics partners, and a strong co-created content angle if a campaign targets operations or supply-chain teams rather than consumers.

Read it for identity and claims rather than method.

Kleinmann writes that at 19 he had 40 clients among some of the wealthiest people in Washington DC, without a degree, because he figured out things they could not: working at a small appliance store in high school, he set up the owner's first computer and inventory system.

• He presents that as the pattern of his career, then lists examples — building drop-shipping at Freshpair before the term was in use when the company could not afford inventory; putting models in underwear in Times Square and calling it a national holiday when there was no marketing budget; and rebuilding a subscription brand's education workflow to cut an unsustainable cancellation rate in half.
• He says some problems took a week and some two years.
• The post carries a quote from Brian Steixner, MD, co-founder and CEO of Popstar Labs, describing Kleinmann's ability to accomplish what he sets out to do.

For brands planning a campaign

The cancellation-workflow example is the clearest documented subscription-retention project outside the Underwear Expert build, so it belongs in any assessment of fit for a retention brief.

Read it for context, not method.

Kleinmann describes starting Freshpair in 2001, when brands did not understand the internet, Amazon was not selling apparel, and there were no online specialty stores — department stores were the only channel anyone understood.

• He says he convinced brand chief executives one by one that their product should be on his website; most had never heard of the concept and many said no, and he built it anyway.
• He argues that much of the men's underwear industry began selling online after seeing it work, and frames that as years of operator-level decisions made without a roadmap.
• The post includes a quote from Ralph Beyda, president of 2(X)IST, calling Kleinmann a visionary who redefined how brands market, sell, and grow, and closes with an offer to talk to DTC brands working out what comes next operationally.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful when a brief needs category context in men's apparel or a brand with long-standing supplier relationships. The quote is an endorsement, not a documented engagement.

Kleinmann contrasts himself with advisors who tell a client what to do and disappear, arguing he stayed in the details at Freshpair — driving inventory to the first warehouse in a rental car, answering customer service calls, doing the accounting, taking out the garbage.

• He ties that discipline to building a company with no safety net, no margin for waste, and no resources to fall back on, and says the discipline did not come from a consulting firm or business school.
• His stated rule is that he does not advise on things he has not done and does not recommend anything he would not put his own money behind.

For brands planning a campaign

Sets expectations for how hands-on a working relationship would look. Useful framing if a brand wants an operator involved in execution rather than a one-off strategy document.

At Underwear Expert he built custom software, over $1M of it, plugged into the Recharge platform: a customer could curate their next box inside the account portal, add a one-time item from the Shopify storefront to a box shipping weeks or months later, and stack a second subscription inside the same portal.

• He names four things brands copying this get wrong.
• The add-on is missing from some touchpoints, such as SMS, upcoming-shipment emails or the portal itself, so customers never learn it exists.
• The messaging implies the add-on repeats every shipment.
• The pricing carries no discount, so there is no reason to add it instead of buying it anywhere else.
• And the brand has not tested enough to know what customers actually want to add.
• His guidance on the product itself is that the right add-on is lifestyle-adjacent and complementary, something the customer would buy anyway, now available in one click while they are already reviewing their box.

Extend the existing subscription platform rather than replace it; put the add-on in every touchpoint; test to find what customers want; treat add-ons as complementary rather than another version of the subscribed product.

The custom build is his own company's software. For consulting clients he describes a different route: manufacturing products made specifically to work only as a one-time add-on. He does not state measured attach rates or revenue results.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the closest material to a retention and add-on revenue brief.

• He can speak to placement across touchpoints, one-time versus recurring messaging, discount logic and add-on selection, and he frames the aim as turning every renewal cycle into a revenue event.
• Expect a test-and-iterate approach rather than a single campaign concept, and expect him to ask what customers have already been observed adding.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

He pulls twelve months of invoices, every warehouse fee, freight charge, accessorial, return processing fee and inventory adjustment, and builds a model of true cost per order, then adds the hidden costs: team hours spent managing warehouse issues, shrinkage rate, and orders reshipped because of warehouse errors.

• In one client case an apparent $7.50 per order turned out to be $11.25.
• When a warehouse left his own outbound orders sitting two weeks and nearly put the company out of business, he documented every issue with what went wrong, what it actually cost, the root cause and how the warehouse responded, including customer service cost and the lifetime revenue of customers who walked away, before deciding to move.
• He describes the first 30 days of a provider failure as a period for building the case, and summarises the habit as fixing the process rather than the problem.

Twelve-month invoice teardown; true cost per order; hidden-cost inventory; issue log recording problem, cost, root cause and provider response; model target cost before building an RFP.

Both cost figures are single examples from his own posts; the model and spreadsheets are not published.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful when a brief involves auditing fulfillment cost, pricing a move, or deciding whether to leave a provider.

• His contribution is the cost model and the evidence file, so a useful engagement starts with twelve months of invoices rather than a request for an opinion.
• He asks for that data by direct message.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

A storage cap tying costs to what the brand paid at its prior warehouse for equivalent inventory, which he says warehouses will agree to but never volunteer.

• A defined inventory-accuracy threshold, because a warehouse can hit every other service level and still lose the brand money through wrong picks, wrong units and mismatched inventory records.
• Written service levels for outbound shipping cut-off, inbound receiving window and returns processing days, on the basis that if it is not in writing it does not exist.
• And an exit clause that triggers a penalty-free exit when issues go unfixed after documented notice.
• He describes one client trapped with a warehouse that was shipping wrong items and had inventory out of control; what worked was documenting every failure and escalating to senior management, and the cheapest exit he negotiated was paying hourly labour to pull pallets as fast as possible.

Cap storage against prior equivalent cost; define and threshold inventory accuracy; write outbound, inbound and returns service levels; build a documented-notice exit trigger; when leaving anyway, pay labour by the hour and just move pallets.

He describes clauses from his own negotiation practice and does not supply template documents. He says most lawyers do not know what to put in these contracts and most founders do not know what to ask for, which is his stated reason for offering to help.

For brands planning a campaign

Adds negotiation specifics a brand can act on before signing or while stuck in a bad contract. Pair it with the cost-analysis topic when a brief covers fulfillment: the costing identifies whether the deal is bad, the contract terms determine whether the brand can leave.

Examples: Source 1

He dates Freshpair to 2001, when brands did not understand the internet, Amazon was not selling apparel and the only channel anyone understood was department stores, and describes convincing brand chief executives one by one to put their products on his website, with most never having heard of the idea and many saying no.

• He says he built it anyway and that much of the men's underwear industry eventually followed online once they could see it working.
• The same post describes assembling brand relationships, customer data and online infrastructure into something that had not existed before, and frames that as years of operator-level decisions made without a roadmap.

Sell the concept to individual brand decision-makers; assemble brand relationships and customer data into new infrastructure; let visible results convert the rest of the category.

This is a retrospective account in his own posts. No dates are given for the brand conversations or measurable outcomes, and the online-first claim rests on his description of the category rather than independent data.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant when a brief involves launching or legitimising a new channel, or when a brand wants evidence of how he handles manufacturer and brand-side relationships. His account is as much about persistence with brand partners as about channel mechanics, so a campaign angle built on early-market credibility fits his material better than one built on reach.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Add-on confusion is, in his words, a communication problem rather than a product problem, so the fix sits in messaging and touchpoints.

• A warehouse that fails is a process problem to be fixed rather than a relationship to be patched through complaints and threats.
• Cancellations at a subscription brand were addressed by going into the workflow and rebuilding the education process, which he says halved the cancellation rate.
• Underneath all three is the same habit: turn the symptom into a cost, find the root cause, and decide from the documented numbers.

Trace symptom to cost to root cause; document before deciding; fix the process rather than the immediate problem.

The halved cancellation rate is stated without the mechanism in detail, the time period or the baseline figure.

For brands planning a campaign

If a brief names a symptom such as churn, low add-on attach rate or shipping failures, he is likely to redirect to the underlying process and ask for the cost and evidence behind it. That makes him most useful in a diagnostic phase before campaign creative is fixed, and it means a brief that only specifies a target metric will get questions back.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

He describes driving inventory to Freshpair's first warehouse in a rental car, answering customer service calls, doing the accounting and taking out the garbage, and states plainly that he does not advise on things he has not done.

• Another post opens with having 40 clients among wealthy Washington DC residents at 19, and traces a pattern back to running an inventory system at a small appliance store in high school.
• Client testimonials appear in two posts: Brian Steixner of Popstar Labs and Ralph Beyda of 2(X)IST.

The testimonials are supplied by him in his own posts; their content is not independently verified here.

For brands planning a campaign

For a brief where a brand wants an operator voice rather than an agency voice, this framing is the hook. It also sets expectations: he positions practical involvement and problem ownership, not strategic distance, and his posts carry direct approaches to work with him.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The pattern is a hook line, a set of specifics in arrowed or numbered form, a named failure or client example, and a closing ask, usually an invitation to message him or a question to the audience.

• Some posts are case narratives about a warehouse or a costing exercise, one is a technical walkthrough of subscription software features, and two use a testimonial as part of the argument.
• There is no video, audio, or long-form article in the reviewed set.

The reviewed set is small and concentrated on a few operating problems, so it shows recurring formats rather than a full picture of how he publishes across channels.

For brands planning a campaign

A text-only, list-driven format suits co-authored or commissioned explainer content on operational topics. Campaigns built around visuals, product demonstration or video would need a different plan and different evidence, and a brand tie-in should expect a service framing rather than a standalone product mention.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6 · Source 7

He describes building drop-shipping from scratch when the company could not afford inventory, driving inventory to the first warehouse in a rental car, answering customer service, and doing the accounting himself.

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The post uses "we" and says the system was built from two decades of knowing what customers need, but it does not state his ownership stake or employment role, so the relationship is recorded as unstated.

View example

Kleinmann names it as the technology his software extended, not as a commercial partner.

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The same post describes Kleinmann convincing brand CEOs one by one to sell their products on his website in the early 2000s, which is a supplier relationship with brands in the men's underwear category rather than a paying partnership.

View example

The post presents this as a testimonial about Kleinmann's problem-solving, not as client or partner work for Popstar Labs.

View example

Bernstein's cancel-reason post — months of cancellations logged as "I have too much product" and a rebuilt reminder flow — sits in the same territory as Kleinmann's rebuild of a subscription brand's education process to halve cancellation and his add-on program at Underwear Expert.

Bernstein works inside DTC subscription brands using platform tools, and his material is dominated by retention mechanics and reported action counts from a single workflow change; Kleinmann draws on a custom software build and wider operations work, so his writing ranges into fulfillment cost, warehouse contract clauses and add-on program design as well as retention.

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Bjorseth's writing is channel and ad-platform economics, largely TikTok Shop and Shopify, for brands he manages as an agency; Kleinmann stays inside operations — the software behind an add-on program, the invoices behind a fulfillment cost, the clauses in a warehouse contract — and does not cover paid-media mechanics.

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Krakower argues that a subscription box is a revenue channel rather than a business model, and that brands need unit economics that survive a funding pullback; Kleinmann's fulfillment cost teardown and contract clauses are the operating detail behind whether those economics hold.

Krakower writes as a marketing agency voice, focused on ad account structure and creative testing, and offers industry-level takes on subscription box viability; Kleinmann writes from running and then consulting on operations, with client-specific costing exercises, contract terms and software builds rather than campaign structure.

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In a post about a subscription brand, Bernstein describes replacing a static reminder with an interactive email for delaying shipments, swapping flavors, changing quantities, and adding a one-time purchase.

• The post reports more than 1,300 customer actions in the first full month and the brand's lowest churn in over a year.
• That gives a brand a concrete retention-workflow angle to test.

The example is about reducing friction in the reminder and cancellation workflow, not designing a broader add-on program.

• It does not explain how to choose add-on products, set incentives, or coordinate add-ons across SMS, email, and a subscription portal.
• For a campaign centered on personalized add-on strategy, Michael Kleinmann's reviewed work is more directly aligned; Bernstein is the more focused alternative when the main problem is customers canceling because routine subscription changes are difficult.

Examples: Source 1