We've Been Busy: A Backstroke Summer Update

Something has been building at Backstroke. And if you've been watching our releases, the conference floors we’ve walked and the LinkedIn posts we’ve shared, you already feel it. If you haven't, let us catch you up.

This spring and summer, we shipped more than most teams ship in a year, went toe-to-toe with the biggest names in ecommerce at CommerceNext, got on stage at Summerfest TechAI, closed our SOC 2 Type II certification . . . and kept our foot on the gas the entire time. 

Here's what's been happening.

Conference Docket: The Rooms We've Been In

CommerceNext 

Our Co-Founder and VP of Marketing, Egan Montgomery, just got back from CommerceNext in New York City. It’s the annual conference that feels more like a reunion of the people who are actually building the future of ecommerce. Egan pitched Backstroke in a Shark Tank-style activation and he caught up with retail's best and brightest, including some of the most influential operators in DTC and digital commerce. 

Oh, and if you saw the aura photos floating around LinkedIn after CommerceNext, that was us. Backstroke's aura photography activation was one of the most talked-about moments on the floor. 

In fact, we ran out of film on day two! Turns out even the most data-driven people in ecommerce want to know what their energy looks like. 

Summerfest TechAI 

Meanwhile, Founder and CEO, R. J. Talyor was at Summerfest TechAI in Milwaukee, speaking to a room full of entrepreneurs and innovators about where AI is taking email marketing. As an email and AI veteran himself, R. J. took to the stage, telling attendees where both technologies are heading together.

Product Updates: What We Shipped

While some of the Backstroke crew was on the road, others were heads-down building. Here's a look at the major releases that have gone live recently.

Hero Lab

When Hero Lab launched, it immediately changed the conversation about creative bottlenecks in ecommerce email. 

The premise is simple. Your designer is slammed, your launch window is closing and you need the perfect hero image in this all-too-common pinch. With Hero Lab, you generate campaign-ready AI hero images in under 60 seconds. Upload a product photo, drop in a style reference, set your headline and go. For brands who have been stuck in a 3–4 day design queue, waiting to run a single creative test, it's a completely different world.

Even more recently, we made Hero Lab extra powerful with new Bulk Variants and a Hero Lab Library. You can now describe the visual look you want, generate on-brand AI backgrounds and turn each one into 36 ready-to-test hero variants in a single workflow. All of it saves to a searchable, manageable library, so the creative that performs well doesn't disappear after one send. It compounds. Your best heroes become reference points for future generations, making every campaign smarter than the last.

Surge

Surge for Campaigns introduced something genuinely new to the market—predictive hero intelligence inside Klaviyo. You upload 2–10 hero image variants and Backstroke's engine—trained on proprietary data from more than 10,000 ecommerce brands and billions of consumer interactions—scores each one against every audience segment on your list. A drag-and-drop Universal Content block drops into your Klaviyo account. You place it in your email. Every subscriber sees the hero most likely to convert them. 

Customers using Surge have documented results like: 

• A 2.2x revenue lift for MERSEA

• 44% higher click-through rates for Helix Sleep

• And a 46% lift in revenue per recipient for Perry Ellis

We also launched Surge for Flows, which helps your biggest automated messages make more money. Essentially, this new feature personalizes automated email flows by picking the hero image most likely to convert for each recipient. That includes welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, browse abandonment and post-purchase emails. 

Instead of sending the same email to everyone, each person gets the version most likely to perform best for them. You set it up once and it keeps working in the background. Over time, that adds up to more revenue without extra effort.

SOC 2 Type II Certification

SOC 2 Type II certification was another major milestone of the season. For enterprise brands and the agencies that manage them, security at this level is a requirement. We completed our audit, 100% of control evidence reviewed, official attestation in hand. Backstroke is now ready for enterprise teams, and the product can support even more of what they need.

Why This Matters Right Now

Every brand is looking for an edge and most of them are looking in the same places—spend efficiency, retention and lifetime value. Email remains one of the highest-ROI tools in the modern marketing stack, but too many brands are leaving money on the table because their email program is still running on a one-size-fits-all hero and message.

Backstroke has spent the last six months building the infrastructure to change that. Not by asking you to overhaul your workflow, switch ESPs or hire three more designers. But by making the emails you're already sending smarter, faster and more profitable, one component at a time.

Hero Lab gives you the creative supply. Surge gives you the predictive intelligence to deploy it. SOC 2 gives enterprise brands the green light to actually use it. And the Hero Lab Library makes your best work compounding rather than disposable.

Come Find Us

We're not slowing down. Subject Line and Preheader Surge is in development. Surge in Slack is coming. The surface area of Backstroke's predictive intelligence is expanding every month.

If you've been watching from the sidelines, now is the time to get in the game. Book a demo and we'll show you what Surge looks like on your highest-revenue flow, as the first proof point.

The summer's been good. The fall is going to be even better.