How Sundays for Dogs Drove 7-Figure Net New Revenue With Applied Labs

Highlights:

• 40% lift in verified save rate in less than 60 days

• 7-figure net new revenue annually

• Only 20% of saves use discounts

• 90% AI CSAT handling 100% of cancellation volume

• "Strongest partnership of any vendor"

Company:

Sundays for Dogs sells air-dried, human-grade dog food at a higher price point than ultra-processed options like kibble or canned. That price point demands real customer education to drive retention.

Travis Crawford, Senior Director of E-Commerce, owns the full customer journey from acquisition through retention. When he audited the cancellation flow, he found a legacy system that hadn't been touched in years and was quietly bleeding revenue. As someone obsessed with providing dogs (including his own) the best, health-backed nutrition possible, he needed a partner who could match that standard for their customers.

The Problem:

Save rates sat at 8%. The Sundays team had a hypothesis that more cancellations could be saved with the right education and offer tailored to each customer’s situation, especially important given the unique challenge for Sundays, where they're overcoming 80+ years of conditioning about what dog food should cost and be. But the old flow offered almost every customer the same discount offer and lacked personalization.

Meanwhile, the team had no trustworthy, detailed data on why customers were leaving, and changing anything in the flow required a week of cross-functional work across design, engineering, and QA.

"If our cancellation flow is just '25% off your next order,' it completely misses the point."

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

Travis evaluated half a dozen vendors: a mix of smaller tools and some of the largest, best-funded new players. The smaller vendors were basic products with AI branding and questions around team expertise. The larger platforms were expensive and lacked a customer success partner he could trust as a true AI collaborator. He needed a partner that was genuinely AI-native and would invest in the relationship.

"I'm a big believer in being experts in our business, and finding partners who are experts in theirs. Applied Labs came with a big promise: we'll do whatever it takes. We're successful if you're successful. That mattered."

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

Three Things That Changed:

1. Verified Save Rate up 40% by educating, not discounting:

Applied Labs first beat Sundays' control to earn the right to handle 50% of cancel volume, then 100%.

Since taking over, Verified Save Rate has increased by 40% in less than 60 days, translating to seven figures in net new revenue annually.

The striking part: only 20% of saves involve any discount. The AI retains customers through education, empathy, and personalized save tactics, not margin erosion. Price-sensitive customers get a different conversation than customers whose dogs had digestive issues. That personalization at scale is what moves the needle.

"We've achieved a directional lift in save rate without leaning on discounts, and that's a big win."

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

Even better, customers are loving the experience. AI CSAT is at 90%, and even higher certain weeks.

2. The strongest vendor partnership Sundays has with the easiest implementation

Applied Labs took on work Sundays didn't have bandwidth for: compiling SOPs, FAQs, scraping the website, building the knowledge base, and integrating into a custom (non-Shopify) stack across their help desk, subscription platform, and internal APIs.

When Travis suggested verifying save rates by checking subscription status days after each cancel attempt, Applied Labs had a working custom dashboard built in a week. That kind of execution has defined the relationship.

"This has been the strongest partnership of basically any vendor we work with. A week later, you had the dashboard built. That rate of execution is insane. Imagine doing that with a big vendor - it'd be 'good luck.'"

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

Sundays now uses AI to provide a more personalized approach compared to what static web pages and standard automated responses previously provided, and still has the flexibility to easily escalate conversations to maintain human to human (and dog!) interactions.

3. Churn and retention insights became a weekly, improvable growth loop

Under the old system, Sundays made one-off changes to their cancel flow in months. Since launch, they've shipped a dozen iterations, with changes going live in hours, not weeks.

This velocity unlocked something bigger than any single optimization: a weekly churn improvement loop. The team now reviews detailed cancel reasons, sees save rates broken down by reason and save tactic, and deploys changes, all without engineering. Every cancellation conversation doubles as structured customer research.

"Visibility into every cancellation is a new layer we didn't have, like a mini consumer research session. Over time it becomes almost exponential, because once you have components and the system is extensible, you can move faster and faster."

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

What's Next:

Travis sees Applied Labs as the foundation for Sundays' broader AI roadmap: hyper-personalized retention using full customer context (tenure, delivery history, preferences), multi-channel AI across the customer journey, and lead conversion experiments, a "dog concierge" that helps prospective customers overcome objections at signup.

"The north star is: the system knows the customer, knows their objections, and can solve them as far up the lifecycle as it makes sense."

Travis Crawford

Senior Director, Ecommerce

By the Numbers:

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