How MANSCAPED® Built a Repeatable Lifecycle Playbook From Its Biggest Brand Moment of the Year with Attentive

MANSCAPED® used the Super Bowl to reintroduce itself

The goal was to broaden how shoppers thought about the brand—from a name known mostly for groin grooming to one with relevance across full-body, face, beard, and skincare. The campaign aimed to build mass awareness, drive new site traffic, and bring more shoppers into a wider grooming portfolio.

But awareness alone wasn't the goal.

MANSCAPED® expected a surge of first-time visitors, many of whom would arrive once, browse, and leave without buying. The retention team needed a way to turn that short-lived spike into something lasting: an owned audience they could keep reaching through SMS and email.

"We knew the Super Bowl would bring a very different kind of traffic to the site. The goal wasn't just to get people there for one day—it was to make sure we had a way to keep the conversation going after that moment passed."
- Lucio Calderon, Director of Retention Marketing, MANSCAPED®

Why a Super Bowl spike called for smarter sign-up timing

A Super Bowl spike isn’t a normal day of traffic. A national media moment can send a concentrated wave of new visitors to the site, while cookie notices and campaign prompts are already competing for attention. MANSCAPED® wanted its sign-up timing tuned to that moment—sharper logic for a high-stakes window, not the always-on cadence the team relied on the rest of the year.

Timing made it harder. The retention team was pulled into the Super Bowl program right as it headed into Black Friday and Cyber Monday execution.

“We didn't have the luxury of a long planning runway. The retention team was brought in later in the process, so we moved straight into strategy and execution—aligning channels quickly and figuring it out as we went."
- Quinn Cantrell, Manager of Retention Strategy, MANSCAPED®

How AI Grow brought intentional timing to a high-traffic moment

AI Grow is Attentive's AI-powered sign-up experience. Rather than running on a fixed set of rules—fire at five seconds, hide on certain pages, suppress for return visitors—it learns from visitor behavior in real time and decides when and how to ask each person to subscribe. For a team like MANSCAPED®'s, that meant getting smarter timing on Super Bowl traffic without hand-building every scenario.

MANSCAPED® worked with Attentive to build a Super Bowl-specific acquisition and lifecycle strategy across onsite capture, SMS, and email.

The foundation was a rethought sign-up experience. Instead of showing every visitor an immediate pop-up, MANSCAPED® added AI Grow to the onsite strategy with clear business guardrails. The team used an eight-second delay, suppressed the experience on certain pages, and kept it from overlapping with other campaign pop-ups.

"We couldn't just fire the sign-up unit immediately during a moment like this. We wanted to capture the traffic, but we also wanted the experience to feel intentional. Attentive helped us put the right guardrails around AI Grow so we could be aggressive without being disruptive."
- Lucio Calderon, Director of Retention Marketing, MANSCAPED®

AI Grow also cut the manual work. The team had been weighing pop-up branches, page-based rules, intent logic, and timing variations. With AI Grow, MANSCAPED® could scale the strategy without hand-building every scenario.

"Under the timeline we were working with, the AI implementation became a no-brainer. We could have built a lot of manual rules, but that would have taken more time and maintenance. AI Grow gave us a way to get smarter timing with a fraction of the work."
- Lucio Calderon, Director of Retention Marketing, MANSCAPED®

MANSCAPED® also built a fallback path for visitors who didn't convert through the primary pop-up. The team added JavaScript to its rotating header banner so that a click triggered an Attentive-powered email and SMS sign-up experience. Visitors got a second chance to subscribe from the top of the site, on any page.

How one sign-up question turned subscribers into signal

The sign-up wasn't only about phone numbers and emails. MANSCAPED® used it to capture Grooming Category Interest, asking subscribers whether they were most interested in full body, groin, face, or beard products. That first-party data helped the team understand whether new visitors still associated MANSCAPED® mainly with groin grooming or were open to the broader brand story.

"We've been expanding into other categories, so it was important for us to understand what people were actually interested in when they came to the site. Capturing that preference at signup gave us more than a subscriber—it gave us a signal we could use in the welcome experience."
- Quinn Cantrell, Manager of Retention Strategy, MANSCAPED®

From there, MANSCAPED® tied the onsite work to a broader retention plan. The Super Bowl program touched most of the brand's email and SMS program: ad hoc campaigns, teaser emails, day-of sends, email and SMS capture, a strategic pop-up, a banner, welcome series messaging, behavioral triggers, abandoned cart flows, SMS teasers, and survey-style SMS.

MANSCAPED® turned Super Bowl attention into subscriber growth

The Super Bowl campaign gave MANSCAPED® a short, high-intent window to turn new attention into owned-audience growth. Across February, the brand captured 4,244 SMS and email opt-ins through its Super Bowl sign-up experiences, including 1,919 SMS subscribers and 2,325 email subscribers.

Mobile AI Grow became the acquisition engine behind the moment. It generated 1,134 SMS subscribers and 1,435 email subscribers—2,569 total opt-ins, or about 61% of all Super Bowl sign-up volume.

Game day showed just how concentrated the spike was. On February 8, MANSCAPED® captured 2,167 SMS and email opt-ins, a 5.4x increase over the prior-week daily average. That new subscriber volume helped feed MANSCAPED®’s Super Bowl-themed SMS lifecycle journeys, turning the attention spike into measurable lifecycle impact after game day.

Why the journeys (not the ad alone) made the moment last

The bigger story was what happened after the sign-up. Full-month reporting showed that MANSCAPED®’s Super Bowl-themed lifecycle journeys outperformed one-time campaign sends, proving the value of having automated follow-up ready when new subscribers raised their hands.

That made the takeaway clear: the ad created the spike, but the lifecycle engine turned that attention into measurable value.

"The biggest takeaway is that moments like this need more than campaign sends. The journeys did the heavy lifting because they gave us a way to convert people after they raised their hand. That's the part we can bottle and use again."
- Quinn Cantrell, Manager of Retention Strategy, MANSCAPED®

The post-ad SMS and email feedback loop surfaced another signal: subscribers wanted in. The reply-to-rate prompt generated 5,515 combined ratings across email and SMS, with a 4.25 average rating and 83.4% of respondents scoring the ad four or five stars.

For MANSCAPED®, the win wasn't just that the Super Bowl pop-up converted. It was that the team built a repeatable way to turn cultural attention into subscribers they actually knew something about—and then use SMS and email to keep the relationship going after the media moment passed.

"We knew the Super Bowl would create a huge traffic moment, but traffic alone wasn't the goal. With Attentive, we were able to capture that attention in a way that felt thoughtful, learn more about what visitors cared about, and use SMS and email to keep converting after the ad ran."
- Lucio Calderon, Director of Retention Marketing, MANSCAPED®