Case Study
Building an internal R&D team at Birchbox to test ideas for increasing subscription revenue & reducing churn.
Birchbox, 2016-2018 – Beauty & Lifestyle (Ecommerce, Subscription Retail)
Problem Statement
Birchbox was the first and, at the time, leading subscription box service in the beauty & grooming space with over 1m subscribers worldwide. But competition was increasing and the company needed to maintain market share.
An internal research & development team was assigned to generate and test new product ideas that would allow the company to offer an improved subscriber experience while increasing subscription revenue and customer retention.
Solution
Devise and run a pilot program with existing subscribers to inform future product development decisions.
My role:
Lead Designer – Ideation, Design Thinking, Workshop Facilitation, User Research, UX/UI Design, Usability Testing, Data Synthesis and Progress & Results Presentation.
Team credits:
Kelsey Conophy - Product Management
Roy Liu - Engineering
Naveed Farahbakhsh - Engineering
Andy Won - Data Science
David Bendes - Box Operations
Megan Kirsch - Customer Experience
+ + Extensive cross team effort
+ + Operating Committee support
Research & Background
This was a rare opportunity to innovate on Birchbox’s product offering, which hinged on receiving a monthly box of beauty/grooming samples for $10.
Along with a dedicated pod of cross discipline team members, I spent 5 months generating ideas, building prototypes and testing different concepts with a cohort of existing Birchbox customers.
We started wide, with ideas exploring areas from improving beauty & grooming profile personalization to providing companion beauty & grooming service programs as part of the subscription. After some early testing and user feedback, we were able to narrow our focus around a set of ideas that gave our customers more variety in, and control over, what they received for their subscription payment each month.
Our team began by brainstorming and categorizing ideas based on customer impact versus engineering effort
I produced rapid low fidelity prototypes for early idea testing
Design & Testing
We developed a series of product offerings we called “swaps & levers” that focused on giving customers more variety and control. These included:
Mobile UI designs used to test the “pause subscription” feature
Offering a standing discount on any full size shop item shipping with the monthly box
Introducing a pause feature into the subscriber account
Providing customers a range of swap features like “swap for points”, where their fee was redirected into shop credit, in place of receiving a box that month
Giving customers the ability to pick specific samples and skip others that were assigned in their monthly box
In addition we designed and ran pricing tests, to understand if customers valued these increased product offerings enough to pay more for their subscription. We then developed a beta test program, which included the new feature set, costing $15 per month which we ran for 3 months with the first 5,000 customers to sign up.
Mobile web and App UI used for testing “Swap” features
Mobile web and App UI used for testing “Pick and Skip” features
The sign up email that went out to recruit beta testers and a WWD article talking about the launch of our pilot program
Outcomes
We captured the results of the beta test program, and presented them to the Operating Committee to inform business decisions.
We had initially proved, on a small scale, that we could generate more revenue by offering more customization features. The “swap for points” feature was a clear customer favorite, as was the subscription pause feature (which was found to increase retention rates). These were pressure tested for scale and profitability before being incorporated into the core product offering the following year.
A snapshot of post-pilot presentation data that our team assembled to present to the Operating Committee
The strongest performing test for increased revenue and retention was “Swap for Points”