How Aviator Nation Drove 11% of BFCM Revenue With Tie

A list you aren’t allowed to burn

Aviator Nation is a California apparel brand that still makes everything in its own Los Angeles factory. Its email list runs to over two million contacts, built across twenty years by a founder who has never wanted to annoy a customer to make a number.

That creates an unusual constraint at peak. Black Friday is the week most brands mail harder and discount deeper. Aviator Nation had decided to do neither, under a mandate to keep growing without leaning on promotion.

Which leaves one lever: reach more of the right people, rather than more people.

“We have a list of well over two million contacts built over twenty years. The last thing we want is to mess that up by getting overly aggressive at the busiest week of the year.” — Curtis Ulrich, Director of Ecommerce, Aviator Nation

Nine out of ten shoppers were strangers

Most of the right people were invisible. Shopify and Klaviyo together recognized roughly 10 percent of the traffic arriving on the site. The rest browsed, added to cart and left as anonymous sessions, and anonymous traffic cannot be activated at all.

During peak season, that gap is at its most expensive. Traffic and intent are both at their high for the year, and four out of five of those shoppers were people the brand could not send a single email to.

“What got me was how much of our own traffic we could not actually see. Someone comes to the site on Black Friday, looks at a hoodie, leaves, and if you have no idea who that was, there is nothing to send them. That is an expensive week to be guessing.” — Curtis Ulrich, Director of Ecommerce, Aviator Nation

Recognize the shopper, let the existing flows do the work

Tie is the shopper intelligence layer that sits on top of the stack a brand already runs. Underneath it, Tie ID resolves anonymous visitors into real, contactable profiles and pushes them into Klaviyo on actual behavior: a page view, a product view, an add to cart.

Nothing was replaced and nothing new was launched into the busiest week of the year. Aviator Nation's existing BFCM campaigns and abandonment flows simply started firing for shoppers who would otherwise have left without a trace.

What that was worth over the window

Over BFCM, Tie-recognized shoppers drove 11% of online revenue and 10% of online orders. On Black Friday alone, Tie drove 14% of online revenue and the window returned more than 1,000x ROI.

None of it came from a deeper discount, a bigger send, or a rented list. It came from people already on the site.

“We spend a big chunk of the year planning for Black Friday, so our performance matters. Three and a half million from Tie is great, and we didn’t have to make any major changes to our programs to do it.” — Curtis Ulrich, Director of Ecommerce, Aviator Nation

Going into BFCM 2026

Recognition answers who is on the site. Since last year, Aviator Nation has added Tie Predict, which scores those shoppers on how likely they are to open and to buy before anyone is mailed.