36% of customers switch to annual plan after one shipment
About
Simplistic, a Shopify Plus preferred partner, is a Brooklyn-based agency agency that specializes in full online commerce, from custom design and development to customer service and in-house fulfillment. The company, located in New York and Connecticut, has created over 500 eCommerce experiences for stores like The Ellen Show, My M&Ms, Nine West and more.
Brooklyn-based agency, Simplistic, was approached by a large licensing company to help build a subscription box website for a popular cartoon cat, Pusheen. Their team then started an extensive search for the right recurring billing app that could scale with anticipated sales growth. After receiving a solid recommendation from the Shopify Plus team, they decided to install Recharge. PusheenBox was so successful that Simplistic has built subscription box businesses for three additional brands.
“Clayton in customer service was incredible for our development team and the client. It’s been the best part of working with Recharge.”
Andrew Gordon
Vice president
Challenge
The story all starts with a chubby cartoon cat named Pusheen who built an online empire. After being created by artists Clare Belton and Andrew Duff as a character in their webcomic “Everyday Cute” in May 2010, the Pusheen cartoon became a popular Tumblr destination for fans.
In early 2016 Andrew Gordon and his team at Simplistic were approached by a licensing company, CultureFly, to help build a subscription box website for Pusheen. CultureFly had successful previous experience working on licensing characters from TV shows and movies and turning them into official products to sell to Target, Kohl’s and other retail giants. The Pusheen subscription box would be CultureFly’s first foray into the subscription side of eCommerce.
Originally, the site was built on Pinnacle Cart using Authorize.net payments. But after realizing they needed a more robust subscription engine to power their store and receiving a solid recommendation from the Shopify Plus team, Andrew decided to switch to Recharge.
Solution
One of the biggest challenges the Simplistic team faced at the time included moving 6,000+ subscribers to Recharge. Clayton Du from Recharge’s customer success team partnered with Andrew’s team to safely and securely migrate PusheenBox customers. Andrew noted, “Clayton was incredible for our development team and the client. It’s been the best part of working with Recharge.”
After clearing the hurdles of the migration, Simplistic’s next step was to customize the subscriptions they offered. The team created options for both quarterly and annual subscriptions and set each to be auto-renew, which further boosts recurring revenue. According to Andrew, “Configuring the Recharge rules was incredible easy and painless - it’s been a great tool for us.”
Results
In addition, Simplistic was able to give PusheenBox customers control over their own subscription settings. “The old platform we used didn’t have an interface for customers to manage subscriptions. We’ve now configured the Recharge customer portal settings to make it easy for customers to change inputs like billing address and credit card info.”
For Andrew and the Simplistic team, the subscription box horizon looks bright! They recently launched the wildly popular NickBox and have plans to partner with CultureFly to roll out additional brands.
“We’ve now configured our customer portal settings to make it easy for customers to manage their subscriptions.”
Andrew Gordon
Vice president
