How Evolve Achieved a 33x ROI Increase on Free Samples with Menza

Customer

Evolve Organic Beauty is a clean beauty brand with a large direct-to-consumer business and a long-running free sample program designed to drive product discovery and repeat purchase. Every DTC order includes three free product sachets, which are reordered on six-month cycles with high minimum order quantities.

The Challenge

Despite the scale and cost of the free sample program, Evolve had never been able to measure which samples actually drove repurchase or return on investment.

Due to Shopify and warehouse system limitations, all sachets were historically grouped into a single SKU. This made it impossible to attribute downstream purchases to individual samples or understand how different sachets performed over time.

As a result, reorder decisions were based largely on intuition and historical precedent rather than data. The team risked repeatedly investing in underperforming samples and making costly MOQ commitments without evidence of impact.

This was a question the team had wanted to answer for years, but had never been able to with existing tools.

How Evolve Used Menza

Evolve used Menza to connect messy, unstructured warehouse and order management data with ecommerce purchase history.

Menza mapped individual sachet SKUs to their corresponding full-size products and analyzed 12 months of historical data to track repurchase behavior and ROI at the individual sample level.

What had previously been impossible to model in spreadsheets or BI tools was handled inside Menza through iterative analysis and follow-up questions, without requiring manual data cleanup or custom pipelines.

Impact

• Unlocked ROI visibility across individual samples for the first time
• Discovered massive variance in performance, with ROI ranging from around 30% to over 2000%
• Identified that a hero product performed poorly as a sachet due to format limitations, including loss of its rollerball application
• Found that previously discontinued samples were among the highest performers, with over 1000% ROI
• Informed six-month reorder decisions using real data instead of assumptions
• Avoided costly MOQ mistakes on sample orders

Customer Quote

This is something we’ve wanted to understand for years and could never do before. Menza made it possible. — Beatrice Piazza, Head of Ecommerce