What Five DTC Brands Put in Their First Email

The welcome email is the one send every subscriber gets. It's also the clearest statement of what a program thinks email is for.

We lined up email #1 from five brands in our gallery database, captured between December 2025 and June 2026. The opening moves barely overlap.

Three open with an offer — three different ways

Bombas's subject says "New Here? Here's 20% Off". The body never shows a code — it's an illustrated catalog tour with a donation counter at 200M+ items. In this email, the 20% is a promise, not a coupon.

Liquid I.V. states its offer as a question: "You're In! 20% off?" The body is surer than the subject — "TAKE 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER WITH CODE WELCOME20", stated flat. Then the fine print takes some back: not applicable on sale items.

Eight Sleep skips codes entirely. A banner offers "up to $250 off", applied automatically at checkout, with no deadline in the body. Under it, the email argues credibility before features: "We've already improved over 500 million hours of sleep."

ROKA sends a letter

ROKA's first email arrives under the subject "We're honored to be part of your journey." — and it's a mission letter. It hands over a personalized 10% code with a 30-day clock, and contains zero shop buttons. The only follow-up it asks for is Instagram.

Email #1 simply declines to sell anything; the selling starts later in the flow.

TUSHY opens the whole store

TUSHY's "Welcome to TUSHY 💦🍑" leads with a SAVE NOW button that never states an amount. Then it walks the product family — Classic through Travel — each with its own shop button, plus social proof ("Loved by over 2 million butts!") and a loyalty pitch: "Get rewarded for pooping."

Where ROKA's first email has nothing to buy, TUSHY's is all shelf. Same slot, opposite bet.

Five programs, five jobs assigned to the same slot: promise a discount, question one, auto-apply one, tell the origin story, or open the catalog. Which version converts best, only each brand's dashboard knows.

What we noticed

• Even the three offer-led openers disagree: Bombas promises 20% without showing a code, Liquid I.V. shows the code but hedges it in the subject, Eight Sleep auto-applies and never prints one.
• ROKA is the outlier by design — a first email holding a private code with no way to spend it.
• TUSHY treats the welcome as a storefront; the discount is a button label, not a number.