Polaroid’s Road to Self-Serve CRM: Escaping Dev-Heavy Platforms

Polaroid's Road to Self-Serve CRM: Escaping Dev-Heavy Platforms

That was the reality for Polaroid before they changed their CRM stack.

This story was originally shared live at one of our Klaviyo events, where Klaviyo users , partners and brands swap real-world CRM and lifecycle marketing wins.

Many established brands inherit tools chosen years earlier for enterprise-grade flexibility. These platforms often demand developers to do even routine marketing work. It looks powerful on paper, but in practice it slows every experiment and makes marketers dependent on technical teams.

The bottleneck of dev-heavy CRM

Polaroid’s CRM Manager, Daniela, described the frustration plainly:

“We were struggling with reporting and building flows. They were charging us to do work, but sometimes it didn’t work and we had to pay more to fix their mistakes. Building a reactivation campaign took four months. As a marketer, you get blocked.”

A system that needs a developer for every new trigger or test becomes a choke-point. Campaign ideas and automations sit in ticket queues and momentum dies. And then there’s the hidden cost of the opportunities that pass by when you move slowly: fewer tests, fewer learnings, and weeks where incremental conversions, upsells, or retention gains never materialize.

Looking for a platform they could actually use

When Polaroid reviewed alternatives, ease of use was the top requirement. They considered HubSpot and Dotdigital, but both insisted on mandatory partner-led migrations - an extra layer of cost and delay.

Klaviyo stood out because it allowed the team to manage most of the work themselves.

“Klaviyo was the only one suggesting an agency wasn’t mandatory. You could do it yourselves,” Daniela said.

Migration reality: fast on the marketing side, slower on the plumbing

The marketing work itself - building core flows, setting up segments, creating templates - moved quickly.

“For the marketing part it took us about two weeks,” Daniela noted.

Where the project slowed was in the integrations: connecting a hybrid multi-market Shopify setup and handling profile counting correctly. The lesson was clear: technical setup still deserves a proper plan, but at least the marketing team wasn’t stuck waiting for developers to build every flow.

Empowering marketers pays off

By switching to a platform they could operate themselves, Polaroid reduced dependency on third-party agencies, accelerated campaign speed and regained control of their customer messaging. They still lean on specialists for complex integrations, but the day-to-day running is firmly back with the marketing team - exactly where it belongs.

The takeaway for other brands is simple:

Choose a CRM platform that matches the skills of the team who’ll live in it every day. The most sophisticated software is worthless if you need a developer to press send.