Klaviyo’s CRM Throwdown: The Future Commerce™ Breakdown

Welcome to Friday, futurists.

Yesterday as the snow dropped in Manhattan, so did the other other shoe (in the CRM battle, that is). We were there, and our analysis continues below.

But before we dive into yesterday's Klaviyo revelation, a brief programming note. The Future Commerce team will be omnipresent at eTail Palm Springs next week, and we've curated the essential moments you won't want to miss:

‍Tuesday, February 25

• 12:05 KEYNOTE PANEL: Building Brand Trust With Today's Socially Conscious Consumer — featuring friend of FC Aman Advani
• 12:55 KEYNOTE PANEL: Creative is The New Ad Targeting: Getting Cut-Through In An Age of Declining ROAS — with the inimitable Ingrid Cordy
• 19:30 [Seymours Palm Springs/Offsite] SPECIAL VIP ONLY FIRESIDE EVENT
• 20:30 OFFICIAL eTail Future Commerce x Adobe Afterparty — RSVP Required

Wednesday, February 26

• 10:05 Transforming CRM for Modern Retail — Phillip Jackson and Klaviyo Keynote
• 13:30 Brian and Phillip Recording Live from the eTail Media Podcast booth

Thursday, February 27

• 08:30 KEYNOTE: Understanding The Key Forces Transforming Retail in 2025 — Phillip Jackson Keynote
• 10:45 Panel: Gen Z: A New Era of eTail — Phillip Jackson Keynote Panel
• 11:35 KEYNOTE FIRESIDE CHAT: Uncharted Frontiers in Consumer Interaction: Shaping Tomorrow's Retail Experience — Brian Lange Keynote Fireside Chat
• C SUITE CONVERSATIONS Sustainable Retail: Embedding Environmental Responsibility into Your Core Business Values — Brian Lange Keynote Panel

We look forward to seeing you in Palm Springs. Now, back to our regularly scheduled analysis...

“This Spot’s Not Big Enough for the Both of Us”

Yesterday, as the snow dropped in Manhattan, so did the other shoe in the CRM battle. Klaviyo unveiled the next phase of its business at an understated event for select analysts and customers that signals a titanic shift in how the company views its role in the commerce ecosystem.

Here’s the gist: 

🧬 DATA FOUNDATIONS:  Klaviyo is rebranding its customer data infrastructure as "KDP" (Klaviyo Data Platform), explicitly moving away from the increasingly nebulous "CDP" terminology.

‍🤖SERVICE CENTRICITY: A new customer service hub aims to consolidate the fragmented landscape of point solutions, promising to transform service operations through AI-powered personalization.

‍📊ANALYTICS EVOLUTION: Marketing analytics tools that claim to eliminate "dumb dashboards" in favor of “insights-to-action”—launching campaigns (and exclusions/segmentations) based on those insights from within the new analytics engine.

THE GOOD: A Victory for Brand Operators

The early numbers are compelling: Dollar Shave Club's 30% decrease in churn and 15% AOV lift in six months suggests there's substance behind the strategy. The "no dumb dashboards" promise is particularly attractive for emerging brands unencumbered by legacy processes and campaigns.

THE GREAT: Klaviyo's Big Move

The enterprise opportunity is evident: become the next HubSpot by consolidating the fragmented service landscape currently dominated by point solutions like Gorgias, Kustomer, and Richpanel.

This fundamental repositioning could make Klaviyo a singular platform in an otherwise fragmented ecosystem of point-solutions. The strategic abandonment of "CDP" terminology in favor of "KDP" signals their intention to own the narrative, even if watching Glossier and Rowing Blazers employees stumble over the new nomenclature at dinner revealed that there’s friction ahead.

THE BAD: HubSpot's Worst Nightmare

While Klaviyo isn't explicitly gunning for HubSpot's enterprise throne (they aren’t direct competitors), their trajectory makes future conflict inevitable. By building a true B2C-first CRM with native service capabilities, they're creating an alternative narrative to HubSpot's B2B-centric worldview. (The Klaviyo slide literally says ‘Customer Hub’).

“CRM” is a market owned by a handful of players and has been largely unpenetrated for about a decade. That’s about to change. The story is compelling, the opportunity is huge—though the enablement effort will take years, not quarters, to fully realize.

THE UGLY: Adoption Hurdles Ahead

Here’s my usual gripes about AI in software; you’ve heard them before.

The new platform's approach to AI content authoring betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how brand editorial processes actually work when moving to the upper-mid market.

Content lives in DXPs, WCMs, custom platforms, and countless collaborative tools—not inside marketing automation platforms.

As Barbara Karpf, founder and president of Decorator's Best (and friend of FC), noted with her usual candor: "They're promising more personalization, but I've been hearing that for a decade." If you want multilingual, multi-region, multistore content and you want to scale that to Customer Hub, too; well you probably need an editorial management process that has approval checks-and-balances. 

If the promise to "transform service from a cost center to a revenue center" sounds familiar because it is—it's the same siren song every service platform has sung since the dawn of help desk software. The difference this time might be Klaviyo's unique position at the intersection of data, marketing automation, and now service.

The road ahead is long, but Klaviyo has demonstrated they have both the vision and the capital to pursue it. Their success will depend not just on technical execution but on their ability to convince the market to embrace this new paradigm while maintaining the trust of their core DTC audience.

Sometimes the hardest part isn't building the technology—it's reshaping how the market thinks about the problem itself.

—Phillip