Kith is an international, multi-million lifestyle brand that is no stranger to the world of direct-to-consumer darlings. Its apparel is popular among the fashion-forward and includes product collabs with the New York Yankees, the NFL, Marvel, and retailers such as Alexander Wang, Birkenstock, and Addidas.
Despite its massive growth to date, the brand was looking for more ways to grow and scale. Enter Andy Oliver, who joined Kith in 2020 and was tasked with the mission to uncover new revenue streams for the business.
Prior to joining Kith, Andy worked at Shopify for eight years managing the 100 largest enterprise merchants. He was able to take his learnings from working with Fashion Nova and FIGS and apply them to his role as the Senior Director of Ecommerce at Kith.
In this story, Andy discusses the importance of creating a remarkable post-purchase customer experience, the challenges in connecting the Shopify tech stack, and how Wonderment creates magical moments for their customers
“I took all my learnings about what worked and didn’t work from managing the Shopify large merchants and created a laundry list that I brought to Kith. When I started at Kith, there were some things that were immediately pressing and improving the post purchase experience was pretty high on the list.” - Andy Oliver, SR Director of Ecommerce at Kith
The Challenge: Managing Customer Expectations on High Ticket Items Leads to High Support Costs
As a company that made a name for itself on high-quality products and retail innovation, Kith’s post-purchase experience didn’t match up to the rest of the brand. Customers would buy products and then would be taken off the storefront to track their order, and delays with orders being delivered also created a back and forth customer service dance. It was as if the pre-purchase and post-purchase journey was totally disconnected. This was hurting Kith’s ability to nurture relationships with existing customers and turn that into additional revenue.
While Kith always had a strong order management system in place, they had a very basic post-purchase experience that consisted of self-service returns and basic Shopify native carrier tracking on all of its stores. Recalling Kith’s post-purchase experience Andy says, “I think it would be considered light to nothing.”
Pre-order purchases and keeping customers updated
To add an additional layer of complexity, Kith has a drop culture, and depending on the drop, customers can preorder product months in advance. While preordering is an incredible strategy to build hype and excitement, it can also create a customer service nightmare.
“We had ping pong tables that were a month preorder and TaylorMade golf clubs that were a nine month preorder. It’s a real struggle for us to maintain a good CSAT score because people get antsy, and it’s very hard to keep people satisfied while they’re waiting.” – Andy Oliver.
It was important for Kith to find a post-purchase service provider that could help them boost the post-purchase customer experience, create opportunities to drive additional revenue, and free up customer support from routine inquiries so they could focus on more complex customer problems.
“[When looking for a tech partner] the big things we looked for were: How can we send more frequent and more high quality proactive notifications to customers? How can we reduce the number of tickets that are coming through to support? How can we win additional views and convert additional revenue from customers tracking their purchase?” - Andy Oliver, SR Director of Ecommerce at Kith
Searching for the right solution to fit Kith’s high expectations
Once Andy identified and understood Kith’s post purchase needs, he needed to find the right tech solution. Having worked at Shopify for eight years, Andy’s a pro at evaluating and selecting tech partners, “Honestly that's my strength. I've been able to identify high value vendors and partners across the board for the company. It’s kind of been one of our secrets to success.”
Andy left no stone unturned and surveyed the entire post-purchase landscape looking at companies such as Narvar, Aftership, and Malomo. During his search, he kept coming across platforms that were outrageously priced and lacked customization. He was disappointed to discover that the so-called “enterprise post purchase” solutions like Narvar (used by Best Buy and Nike) were falling short of his expectations and Kith’s needs.
“We chatted with Narvar and I was caught off guard by the ticket price that they were trying to attach to delivery estimates alone. It was the single biggest price of all their features, which was a bit surprising. I was disappointed in Narvar’s lack of flexibility and design. We are a really brand centric company, and the very first question we always ask is can we style whatever your product is to look like us? If the answer is no, it's usually a no for us.”
That’s when Wonderment came into the scene. Wonderment’s team reached out to Andy and asked if they could partner together to create an incredible post purchase experience for Kith. Even though Andy was in later stage conversations with another vendor, he was open to entertaining the possibility of working with Wonderment. Why? Flexibility in pricing and design, and an incredible product support team.
“[Wonderment] had just rolled out this headless, API front end, where we could really make this tracking page look custom. We were certainly very impressed by Wonderment’s service level, and also impressed by the tech…part of what's made us successful is we've been really savvy with the vendors that we've chosen to work with.”
The Solution: How Implementing Wonderment Increased Revenue and Decreased Support Tickets
Kith was eager to implement Wonderment to build out a post purchase experience, and Wonderment understood the importance of moving quickly. And this speed stood out to Andy. He says,“We implemented it really, really quickly. Wonderment’s support and service team has been outstanding. The technology team has also been willing to pitch in when we needed it. I can't imagine having implemented this any faster with any other platform. There's just no way.”
Kith built out an entirely customized post-purchase experience that consisted of storefront-native shipment tracking and transactional messages . In its first 9 months, Kith seen a decline in customer inquiries about order tracking.
Andy says, “It's very unusual for us to find a vendor and partner where the technology is great and the service is great. Wonderment definitely has both.”
After such an incredible experience with Wonderment on its US site, Andy rolled out Wonderment internationally across X additional storefronts. “I just want to do Wonderment everywhere,” says Andy.
Andy is continuing to leverage Wonderment’s tracking technology not just for delivery experience but is using the real estate for self-service customer FAQs, engaging post-purchase content like product care instructions, and is continuing to explore new creative ways to upsell customers.