Built by a merchant who got tired of overpaying for email
I’m Jeremy. My wife and I have been running an international beauty brand since 2007: Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, the whole stack. Email has been the brand’s best channel for most of that time, and for a decade the platform behind it was Klaviyo. I was an early adopter. I used it every day. I know it better than most of the people who sell it.
Somewhere along the way the bill stopped making sense. Klaviyo charges by the number of profiles in the account, and keeping one can affect your plan even when you do not email it. Meanwhile the parts I actually relied on stopped improving for a store my size. The Shopify discount integration is the one I hit most: its native editor exposes a defined, limited subset of Shopify’s discount settings, while Shopify’s own discount engine kept moving. Half my segments existed only to keep bad addresses, bots and the long-gone out of my sends. That is plumbing, and it was my job.
Then Shopify changed. Its pixel, its identity, its APIs got good enough that a platform built today, as part of the store rather than a script on top of it, can do things a platform built in 2012 was not built to do. So I built the email platform I actually needed, on Shopify’s own identity and discount systems, the way we built Carpe Inventory IQ before it: for our own brand first. Our store is the first merchant on it, and every feature runs on our own list, our own sends and our own money before it runs on yours.
This is not a venture-backed startup guessing at what merchants want. It is a merchant sharing the system he built for himself, for the store that already runs email, knows what it is worth, and is done paying enterprise prices for a tool that stopped improving for them.
Why is it called Carpe?
Most people know carpe from carpe diem, “seize the day.” But the Latin is more nuanced than that. Carpe literally means to pluck, gather, or harvest, like picking fruit at the exact moment it is ripe.
When I was younger, I worked in the entertainment industry and was lucky enough to tour the world with the projects I worked on. We were paid a per diem, a daily allowance for meals and expenses on the road. Sometimes it added up to real money. One day I was working on location near a marina and noticed a beautiful dark blue sailboat with Carpe Diem on the hull. Not the most creative boat name of all time, but my eyes played tricks on me: I read it as Carpe Per Diem. Seize the per diem. I laughed, and that became the name of my business.
For a messaging tool the harvest meaning fits just as well. You gather the people who asked to hear from you, and you send at the exact moment it is ripe. It’s pronounced car-PAY, by the way. Not carp.
Why is the assistant called Talaria?
Talaria are the winged sandals of Hermes, the messenger of the gods. They are not the messenger; they are what carries the message. That is the whole idea: Talaria drafts what you describe, in your segments and soon in your email, and you keep the last word on every line. The winged sandal is the mark on our logo, so the name was already there waiting. Its sibling at Carpe Inventory is called Ledger.