Within a few months, driving change within the business became a core focus of mine - with the distinct aim of developing our technology stack to future-proof the brand's rapid growth. One of those things was moving us away from another provider to Swap. It got to a point where we just wanted to be independent and manage our markets.
Founded by sisters Alice and Maisie Jones in 2017 from a small village in North Wales, the brand has continued to jump from strength to strength and is only just getting started. Sisters & Seekers provides slower collective releases that encompass an overall story and vision for the brand, setting trends ahead of the game.
Katie Roberts, Digital Marketing Manager at Sisters and Seekers, joined us today to dive into all the growth happening at Sisters & Seekers.
The all-in-one solution with Swap turned out to be the perfect fit.
It was a happy coincidence. We spoke with Nick at Swap about returns moving over from a competitor. Once we saw Swap’s offering, we knew we needed it because of the focus on revenue retention, customer experience, and Swap global (cross-border). It just felt like a better product overall.
When you look at other providers, they’re not comparable, honestly. The amount you get with Swap, you begin to wonder if it’s too good to be true. But, I can happily say we’ve only had good things to say since we started.
All businesses reach a point where international expansion becomes critical to success – this was a key to the fruitful partnership between Sisters & Seekers and Swap.
We have quite a complex tech stack. We're in the process of trying to simplify that complication, and we came across Swap. We looked at various options. Swap was the most approachable in tailoring the warranty, repairs, and returns to what we needed.
Their problems were across multiple touchpoints in the customer experience.
Swap was exactly what we needed. The way it works is that it utilizes technology to calculate all the duties and taxes. All of our compliance is managed by Swap, which is incredible.
To be honest, we felt like we didn't have autonomy over our international markets, but making the switch felt like an enormous task. The team just made it easy and so stress-free. There was a point during the internal management of the migration where we did question our capacity for success without a full cross-border solution in place, as this was unchartered water for us. Once we’d regroup with the Swap team, we’d both say, “I feel so much better, do you?" every time.
Once the move was made, it was time to deliver the goods.
The results have been really, really positive and our international sales are up. We found that once we enabled instant exchanges, it made a massive difference because we have a sell-out culture to our releases. When we do a drop, people know it’s going to go, so offering our customers the capacity to secure their most-wanted pieces at the point of exchange has enabled significant revenue retention.
Before, our exchanges were paper-based, and by the time the package returned to our warehouse, we’d lose revenue on the order, not because the customer didn’t want to make an exchange, but because their item of choice would be sold out by the point of delivery to our warehouse.
Once we turned on instant exchanges, we retained funds within the business. It’s had a massive impact on the amount of revenue we've been able to retain because we're not having to disappoint customers later on in the journey, which was a primary focus for myself and the Customer Care team – enabling us to improve the customer experience overall.
When you’re able to consolidate all your tech in one place, it makes your whole team’s life easier.
Now, our product team benefits from snapshot data accumulated from customer motivations for making a return. This valuable feedback was previously only verbally shared between teams, namely if our Customer Care team would receive comments via email or DM regarding product quality.
Now, having those figures in clear metrics in front of us, it's easy to see where the problems are and where the successes are. We’re able to hone in on our product quality straight away.
When the stakes get high, Swap delivers, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
We say this all the time. If we did not have Swap in place, we wouldn’t have been able to get through peak season because it made returns so much quicker.
With returns, they’re now all listed in the same portal, which has been an enormous help. Before, we had to go back into individual carrier portals. Swap saved us come Black Friday Cyber Monday because of the speed we had to operate at during this period. To think of adding all the time of going into different portals, our efficiency would've been significantly lower, and our customers would have suffered as a result.
Peak season or not, our CS team is attentive to every need and always delivers.
Even down to the customer service team's level of support – it has also been great. As part of our loyalty program, we wanted to offer free returns to specific customers with certain tags, but only in the UK. The Swap support team created the rules that would allow that per region, which we had never been able to do with our previous software.
Even the way the team has been willing to integrate it with other elements of our tech stack has been really, really positive.
End to end, Swap has delivered. I've had a million sales calls, and everyone will promise you the world at the start. I feel like Swap is one of the only companies that followed through on that promise.
