Be like Love Your Melon, and give more back to your community.
With Loop, mission-driven businesses can boost revenue retention, and contribute more to the causes they care about.
Love Your Melon donates 50% of net profits to charities fighting childhood cancers — and Loop’s support in boosting operational efficiencies and retaining revenue from returns helped them generate over $1m in donations.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
decrease in manual returns support
decrease in manual returns support
Love Your Melon started out selling beanies from a table outside of a St. Paul, MN restaurant, and giving cozy beanies to children fighting pediatric cancer in a one-for-one model.
More than a decade later, Love Your Melon is a vibrant e-commerce company with an international presence, shipping high quality products to hundreds of thousands of consumers each year and donating millions in dollars and product to pediatric cancer charities including the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Boston Children’s Hospital, and Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. To date, they’ve given nearly $10 million to pediatric cancer charities, and over 250,000 beanies to children battling cancer.
Before they began working with Loop, Love Your Melon knew their returns process didn’t deliver the customer experience they wanted their brand to reflect.
Shoppers who wanted to return items received pre-printed return labels with their products, but didn’t receive their refund until the item was returned to the warehouse. As a result, they were unlikely to choose a new item from the brand – and Love Your Melon wasn’t getting important data insights to understand why the returns were taking place.
By enabling Instant Exchange, Love Your Melon gives their shoppers access to a self-service returns portal where they can select the reason for their return, and instantly receive store credit to select a replacement item from the shop that fits their needs.
“It’s allowed us to give our customers as friction-free an experience as possible,” Charlie Carlisle, Chief Operations Officer, explains. “They get the information they need right away, and can easily complete an exchange or buy a new product. It’s a far better experience than just receiving a pre-printed label with your shipment and needing to wait until it’s returned to our warehouse to be processed.”
With the Loop Insights analytics dashboard, the brand can get access to data around why each return took place – whether there was a product defect, the product was the wrong size, or the shopper didn’t like the style.
When starting a return on the Loop returns portal, shoppers are encouraged to give meaningful feedback about their shopping experience, allowing Love Your Melon to find new ways to delight them in future.
When you handle a return using pre-printed labels, Carlisle explains, the only thing you know for sure is that your shopper was somehow unsatisfied, but it is generally unclear why. Loop’s online portal, on the other hand, prompts customers to give quantitative and qualitative feedback, in formats that Love Your Melon can easily analyze to enact meaningful changes.
“Loop helps give our customers a voice, and lets us make improvements throughout the supply chain,” Carlisle says. “The reason our return rate is going down is in part because of the learnings that Loop enables us to get from each return we handle.”
Love Your Melon’s reason for being is founded on their desire to give back to children with cancer, both in the form of product donations and donations to pediatric cancer charities.
Using Loop has helped the brand boost revenue retention and upsells, reduced hours dedicated to customer support by 400%, and helped them make significant improvements to their product inventory and descriptions that have led to further increases in sales. Altogether, in their first year using Loop, they were able to generate $1 million in contributions to pediatric cancer nonprofits.
“Loop has really helped us, as an e-commerce business, to continue to thrive and to accomplish our giveback goals,” Carlisle says. “Our company is ultimately in business to help fund the fight against pediatric cancer, and Loop helps us fulfill that purpose.”
With Loop, mission-driven businesses can boost revenue retention, and contribute more to the causes they care about.
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