23 Years, One Email List: What Julie Cole of Mabel's Labels Knows That Most Brands Don't

Laryssa Wirstiuk Updated on Jul 13, 2026

Everything else can disappear tomorrow - the social following, the content, the algorithm's goodwill. The only thing you actually own is your email list.

That's the line from Julie Cole, co-founder of Mabel's Labels, that stuck with me after our conversation. Julie has been running Mabel's Labels for 23 years, and in that time she's built an email list she treats not as a marketing channel, but as the company's most valuable asset. Here's what that's looked like in practice, two decades in.

Started in a Basement, Traded for a Foosball Table

Mabel's Labels launched 23 years ago - before social media existed - when four moms with zero technical background decided to start an e-commerce company anyway. None of them could build a website, so they did what young entrepreneurs are good at: they used their network. A couple of IT-nerd friends from college agreed to build the site in exchange for the foosball table sitting in the basement.

That's the origin story of a multi-million-dollar brand: a foosball table and a favor.

It was a genuinely uncertain time to sell online. Customers were still nervous about typing a credit card number into "the computer machine." Trust was the biggest barrier to a sale, not price or product.

The First Big Lift: An Early Newsletter, Not an Ad

Long before Klaviyo existed, Mabel's Labels got its first real marketing win from an e-newsletter called Daily Candy, which ran a weekly "Daily Candy Kids" edition. A customer submitted Mabel's Labels to it without the company's knowledge - and the order volume that followed was the first sign of how powerful a trusted inbox could be.

Julie describes a pattern that's still true today: a mention would create a spike in orders, the spike would settle, and then a second spike would follow once the product was "out in the wild" and other parents started asking where to get it. The baseline never dropped back to where it started. For a bootstrapped company that couldn't afford even half a page in a parenting magazine, this kind of earned trust was everything.

That experience shaped an early instinct: the more email addresses you collect, the more durable your business becomes - because unlike a feature in someone else's newsletter, an email list is something you own outright.

"Hell No" - Protecting the List Like It's Gold

Two decades of list-building has made Julie fiercely protective of it. She gets regular requests from conference organizers and partners asking her to email her list on their behalf, and her answer is consistently no - even when it costs her a speaking engagement.

Her reasoning: sending content her audience didn't sign up for risks the one thing that makes the list valuable - trust. A single irrelevant email can trigger an unsubscribe, and once that trust erodes, it doesn't come back. So the list stays curated, and every send has to earn its place in someone's inbox.

Segmentation by Life Stage, Not Just Purchase History

What makes Mabel's Labels' email strategy distinctive is how literally it segments by life stage. The company has a dedicated email lead and a team that pores over open rates, click-throughs, and attributed sales - but the real insight is in how they use that data to track customers as people, not just as transactions.

A parent who bought toddler labels years ago might now need:

Tie-dye labels for a tween
Plain labels for a kid heading to college
Labels for a child starting daycare, with a shift from "princess" to "star" icons as the kid ages
And now, increasingly — labels for aging parents moving into senior care, so a mobility device or a piece of laundry makes it back to the right room

That last one is a genuinely unusual product evolution: Mabel's original customers are aging alongside their own parents, and the company built a product line to meet them there. It's a direct result of paying attention to where customers actually are in their lives, not just what they bought last.

This segmentation is also why repeat purchase rates are so high. Email doesn't just remind people to reorder - it gives them a reason to, season after season, stage after stage.

Social Gets Attention. Email Gets the Sale.

Julie is clear that social media still matters - Mabel's Labels was an early adopter and built a following of 200,000+ Facebook fans well before most brands took social seriously. But she draws a hard line between the two channels' jobs:

Social media's job is to get attention and drive traffic to the site. It's not responsible for conversion.
Email's job is to convert - and to do that, the website has to be ready to close the loop once the click happens.

Every part of the funnel has to respect that handoff. If the social team gets the click but the site loses the customer, that's a website problem, not a social media problem. Julie describes marketing at Mabel's Labels as fundamentally collaborative - separate teams for content, email, and site experience, all responsible for not being "the one who loses the customer."

Her broader read on marketing today: you cannot be asleep at the wheel. A platform's algorithm can shift overnight, AI is reshaping how search and keywords work, and a strategy that worked last year needs re-checking constantly - as Julie puts it, "you could have a PhD in Google today, you'll need a new PhD tomorrow."

Building In-House, On Purpose

One detail that's easy to miss: Mabel's Labels isn't built on Shopify. The company built its own platform in-house, with its own IT team, because they wanted full control over the customer experience. It's a deliberate choice that reflects the same philosophy as the email list - owning the infrastructure that matters, rather than renting it.

User-Generated Content as a Trust Multiplier

Mabel's Labels leans heavily on user-generated content, partnering with parents - especially nano- and micro-influencers - to show real families using the product. Julie's reasoning ties back to the same theme running through the whole conversation: trust.

In a moment where audiences are increasingly skeptical of brands and unsure what's AI-generated versus real, seeing a trusted person use and vouch for a product transfers that trust to the brand. Julie's advice to other founders is to lean into being visible and unpolished - share the mistakes and the wins, not just the highlight reel. As she puts it, "it doesn't have to be curated. It's documentation."

The Throughline

Whether it's the email list, the in-house tech stack, or the willingness to say no to a request that could damage subscriber trust, the pattern in Julie Cole's approach is the same: build and protect the things you actually own, and treat the audience's trust as the asset it is - because everything else is borrowed.

About Julie Cole

Julie Cole is a recovered lawyer, mom of six, and co-founder of Mabel's Labels - the company behind the durable, dishwasher-and-microwave-proof labels that have helped keep kids' belongings (and now, their parents' belongings) from getting lost for over two decades. She's an award-winning entrepreneur and a bestselling, award-winning author, recognized with honors including the RBC Woman Entrepreneur Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship and a spot on the PROFIT/Chatelaine W100 list. Julie has appeared on NBC's The Today Show, CNN, HLN's Raising America, Breakfast Television, The Marilyn Denis Show, and more, with writing featured in The Huffington Post, Today's Parent, The Globe and Mail, and Working Mother Magazine.

She's also a sought-after speaker on entrepreneurship, parenting, and marketing, known for bringing warmth, humor, and authenticity to every stage she's on.