Wildgrain reduces churn by 17% with a comprehensive retention strategy
About
Wildgrain is a unique subscription service that emerged in 2020 as a family-owned venture. Born out of a passion for exceptional bread and pastries, the husband and wife duo recognized the disparity in bread quality in the United States compared to Europe. With one partner's expertise as a baker and the other's technical skills as a computer engineer, they set out to create Wildgrain, a subscription service that delivers bake-from-frozen premium bread, pasta, and pastries right to your door.
Screenshot of the bread selection process on Wildgrain's ecommerce site
“If you want to run a subscription program—and I recommend almost every ecommerce company to try to do a subscription program—to use Recharge and give it a try. It's very quick to onboard and you don't really need help to do it.”
Ismail Salhi
Founder, Wildgrain
Challenge
When Wildgrain sought to launch their brand for the first time in 2019, they were looking for a subscription app that integrated well with Shopify and allowed them to manage their program without hassle. They wanted to start off with a curated box model where the items inside could change every month, with options that they could also build upon as their business grew. With Ismail’s technical background, he was looking for a strong and well-documented API to do customizations that would take Wildgrain to the next level.
Solution
Wildgrain launched in 2020 with Shopify and Recharge for their curated box experience. They decided to go with Recharge because of its robust API and ability to support constantly rotating SKUs, along with its well-known integration with Shopify. At the time of their assessment, they also saw that Recharge integrated with major payment processors like Stripe and Braintree, providing more flexibility for payment options.
Over the last three years, Wildgrain has also been able to leverage the Account Management team to facilitate more technical conversations with internal teams like Product and Support, and ideate together on ways to achieve specific deliverables, such as improving LTV. With their account manager’s expertise in the field, they have been able to draw inspiration from what other successful businesses in similar industries have achieved with regular check-ins on the health of their recurring revenue.
Wildgrain uses Recharge’s native Affinity customer portal, with additional customizations using the SDK to suit their customers’ needs. It was most notable for its ease of use, speed, and mobile optimization, with new and upcoming features in the pipeline. They were also able to answer their customers’ top featured request for a “build-a-box” experience by leveraging Recharge’s core Bundles offering, and have begun using Flows to test out additional experiences for customers like surprise-and-delight gifts. They use Flows to encourage customers to add products to their order in order to get a free gift, and as a result, have successfully been able to move customers to purchase who have delayed their order and improve their overall order frequency.
All of this combined enabled their business strategy, so that they could address retention from both the technical side with customization and the non-technical side with ease-of-use for their marketing team.
Results
As a result of their integrated tech stack along with Bundles, Flows, and their new Affinity portal, Wildgrain has decreased their churn by 17% in the last 6 months and increased their average active days by almost ⅓. By utilizing Recharge’s API and SDK they’ve given their customers full flexibility to be able to make changes to their account, such as allowing their inactive subscribers to easily order a one-time box without the need to reactivate their subscription which has been a huge component to increasing their customer LTV. Plus, they’ve won customers back after implementing Bundles and were able to give their customers exactly what they asked for to directly combat churn.
With over 40,000 subscribers, Wildgrain is able to provide full service to all of their customers while minimizing the ongoing labour needed to maintain the program through Recharge’s turnkey products and ability to customize upon them.
“And so [Bundles] allowed us to improve our AOV and improve our churn as well. A lot of people were leaving because they wanted custom boxes, and we have a lot of reactivations now because we notified people [that were inactive] that that [build-a-box] feature was available until they came back.”
Ismail Salhi
Founder, Wildgrain
