quip turns to Recharge to power subscriptions at scale
About
quip is a design-led oral health and wellness company on a mission to turn have-to-do chores into want-to-do rituals. They’ve scaled over the last 10 years from a direct-to-consumer toothbrush company to a multi-product, omnichannel leader in the personal care space.
A quip toothbrush being placed into a holder on a bathroom counter
Their honest, accessible, and simple oral care products help users focus on the habits that really matter, bringing delight to daily routines. They know the right products, thoughtfully designed, will make you want to brush and floss every day—no gimmicks required.
The implementations team at Recharge was great to work with. Whenever challenges came up with intricacies with data or the integration with Shopify, they helped us resolve any issues. Despite a very aggressive timeline, we considered our migration and launch an unmitigated success due to our partnership with Recharge.
Meredith Glansberg
CRO, quip
Challenge
quip had long powered their storefront with a homegrown ecommerce platform. But as their business scaled, that platform started to turn from an asset into a burden.
For one, it demanded resources that would be better spent on growth initiatives. Building infrastructure in house afforded greater control, but kept quip’s total cost of ownership (TCO) high. Plus its limited feature set constrained their offerings to customers, preventing them from building the seamless, delightful subscription experiences they envisioned.
If quip were to keep growing, they would need to remove that bottleneck. They knew that an off-the-shelf ecommerce platform could provide the features and reliability they needed, while mitigating their TCO.
And while they were at it, they could use a dedicated subscription platform too. quip is a subscription-first business, with this channel not only being a core platform for business success, but also one that pushes their mission to improve healthy habits forward. Did you know you should change your toothbrush every three months for it to be effective? Their subscription helps take the guesswork out!
quip’s in-house platform supported subscriptions, but it lacked important features like easy shopper self-management, shipping frequency updates, or product swaps. Many products even defaulted to the same three-month replenishment cadence used for toothbrush heads, whether that cadence made sense for them or not.
quip needed a more flexible solution.
Hands holding quip products
Solution
quip had a few key parameters in mind during their search for a new subscription platform. First, their candidate would need to plug the feature gaps in their existing subscription platform, so robust subscription management options right out of the box were a top priority.
Second, their subscription platform would need to integrate seamlessly with Shopify, their new ecommerce platform of choice. Interoperability was key—half-baked integrations could add overhead instead of removing it, undercutting their mission of simplicity.
Recharge satisfied both criteria. Not only is Recharge equipped with a well-rounded suite of subscription management features out of the box, but the Recharge platform is designed from the ground up to integrate tightly with Shopify. In fact, over 93% of Shopify Plus merchants choose Recharge to power their subscriptions.
Implementation
As an existing enterprise with a huge national subscriber base, quip needed a smooth transition to Recharge—any hiccups could impact thousands of subscribers.Recharge’s migration team scoped the process end-to-end. They took in quip’s existing subscriber data, standardizing it for smooth interplay between quip, Recharge, and Shopify.
After a testing and QA period to make sure there were no wrinkles, they worked with quip to migrate subscriptions from quip’s in-house platform to Recharge without a hitch—millions of current and past subscription data were imported with zero data loss. Customers never experienced an interruption.
Results
quip is now running at full speed with Recharge, using their flexible new subscription platform to deliver a premier and scalable customer experience. With tools like Automate, they’ve refined their subscription model by automatically transitioning customers to subscription-led refills after purchasing a marquee product—perfect for essentials like toothpaste and brush heads.
They’ve also adopted additional growth and retention tools within Recharge’s platform to further boost customer lifetime value and reduce passive churn. And with the tech debt of their legacy platform offloaded, quip lowered their TCO, allowing their team to focus on what they do best: designing user-centric products that set their brand apart.
With Recharge, we have a best-in-class solution with a predictable spend that reduces the amount of resources spent on building and maintaining custom tech. That frees up our resources and attention to focus on our core oral wellness mission and the things that will take quip to the next level, such as relaunching our app with brush-syncing capabilities to complement our new quip Ultra sonic smart brush launch this past February.
Meredith Glansberg
CRO, quip
