Inside ChargeX East: How the best brands are driving retention in the agentic era

ChargeX East was designed to go deeper.

Presented by Recharge and Shopify, the event brought together brands, partners, and operators in New York City for a day focused on what’s driving subscription growth right now and where it’s going next. The conversations covered real decisions operators are making now and where subscription commerce is heading — from retention design and channel expansion to what it means to run a subscription program in the agentic era.

Here’s a closer look at what stood out.

1. The next era of subscription

Oisin O’Connor, CEO and co-founder of Recharge, opened with the problem everyone in the room already lives with. Buying a customer keeps getting more expensive, with Meta costs up as much as 25% year over year and no sign of reversing. That makes what happens after the first order the whole game, and subscribers are the customers who come back.

Subscription platforms have been answering that problem for a decade, and what brands need continues to evolve. From developer tools for deep customization to turnkey retention tools merchants could run themselves, we are seeing a new era emerge. We call it the Agentic Retention Era, where merchants stop asking for a better set of tools and start asking for a partner that runs their retention program alongside them.

In practice, that partner covers three things merchants keep asking for: help my customers, help me understand what’s happening, and help me run my business.

Aidan Thibodeaux, CEO at Skio, introduced the Skio platform and walked through the combined Recharge and Skio roadmap, and what the ecosystem now covers for merchants.

Tarek Abou Chakra, Head of Product, split the Recharge roadmap into what’s ready for Q4 and where the platform goes next. Quick Actions were rebuilt from the ground up, so a merchant can stack several changes into one link and drop the sign-in step that used to cost conversions. Add-Ons attach a heavily discounted product to an existing subscription so it can never be ordered on its own. Shopify’s automatic discounts now carry through to recurring orders. Deflection pages are the other Q4 priority, and merchants with the right offer have more than doubled their save rates.

Remi, Recharge’s support and analytics chat, has been available, but we teased the future of Remi – expanding capabilities into helping merchants build retention flows, customize customer portals without code.

2. What the Shopify + Recharge stack looks like with AI

Dom Coryell, Product Director at Shopify, walked through the full campaign-building loop on  a Shopify and Recharge tech stack — segment a subscriber list, build a promotion, identify a winner, scale what worked. Dom ran the session step by step in  a fictional store environment, showing where AI handles the execution and where operator judgement still makes the call. The practical takeaway: the brands already building these AI habits will have a measurable speed advantage heading into a competitive Q4. The loop from hypothesis to result to next test is getting shorter, and the gap between teams who are running it and teams who aren’t is starting to show.

3. “Give them a reason to stay”

Cherene Aubert, founder of GrowthCapital and former growth leader at ILIA and Bobbie,  brought one of the day’s most direct frameworks. Her core argument: most subscription programs are built around what’s convenient for the business, not around what the subscriber actually experiences. Out-of-the-box setups, loyalty programs that out-reward the subscription tier, and offer strategies built on volume rather than intent are all slow leaks, and many programs have more than one.

Her fix came as three plays: design the subscriber experience, reward subscribers like the loyalists they are, and win the offer game. Every touchpoint, from cadence to cancel flow to rewards structure, should give a subscriber a reason to stay rather than a harder path out.

4. Brands building a Lasting Impact

Three brands were recognized at ChargeX East for subscriber experiences built to last.

ButcherBox and eHouse received the Partnership Award. What started as a platform migration became a full rebuild of the subscriber experience — infrastructure now supporting one of the longest-running subscription relationships in DTC, with customers who have been subscribing for close to a decade.

POV Beauty received the Momentum Award for building retention into the program from day one — rapid experimentation and subscriber incentives before the business was large enough to learn those lessons the hard way. A useful model for how newer brands should think about year one.

Arrae received the Performance Award. The brand grew from two hero products to over $100M in revenue, expanded into Target, Ulta, and Amazon, and still has more than half of its customers on active subscriptions. Retail expansion and subscription health are often framed as competing forces. Arrae is evidence they don’t have to be.

5. The strategies that kept surfacing: Rewards, iteration, and channel expansion

Across brand-led breakout sessions featuring OneSkin, The Absorption Company, Create Wellness, Light Labs, Liquid+, and Balance of Nature, a few themes kept resurfacing.

• Rewards and membership are replacing discounts as the primary retention lever. Shifting from discount-first offers to credits, paid membership tiers, and portal-level perks changed subscriber behavior — not just in the cancel flow, but upstream of it. Subscribers who feel like members behave differently than subscribers waiting for the next deal.
• Iteration is everything. The brands moving fastest on retention are running constant small tests rather than making large infrequent bets. AI is compressing the time from hypothesis to result, and the brands building that habit now are building a structural advantage.
• Subscription has to be designed to survive channel expansion. As brands grow into retail and marketplace channels, the direct subscriber relationship requires deliberate protection. The answer, in most cases, is building more value into the subscriber experience than any other channel can match.

The through-line across the event was consistent whether the conversation was about platform roadmap, AI-assisted campaigns, retention design, or channel expansion. Subscription commerce is getting more deliberate — more designed, more tested, more tuned to what subscribers actually want from a long-term brand relationship. ChargeX East was a good reminder of how much that work is already underway.