Flipping Ecommerce on its Head

Imagine this: it’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and you’re a brand with customers on your website pushing the buy button, but instead of moving them down the funnel, you stop them and interrupt the buying process to ask them, “How are you feeling right now?”

Seems like a crazy thing to do right? Especially in a world that is dominated by closing sales and doing everything possible to get a consumer to hit buy. You’re literally pausing a conversion, making a customer examine his or her activity and second guess making a purchase. Nevertheless, that was the strategy Bearaby put into practice this past holiday season and the results might just surprise you.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Kathrin Hamm, the Founder and CEO of Bearaby, tells us that that mindfulness experiment, while risky and not advised by her industry peers, paid off in big ways. Bearaby was able to gain insights into consumer behavior and gather data that helped predict whether or not a customer was likely to return a product or not. And, most importantly, Bearaby was able to build more trust with customers and foster a more authentic relationship centered around mental health and the customer’s well-being, which in today’s world goes a long way toward creating a loyal base of customers. Kathrin also explains why adding more mindfulness and behavioral queues into the customer journey could have a positive impact on return rates, overall customer satisfaction, and your NPS score.

Main Takeaways:

• Do You Need This?: So many brands are trying to optimize for sales and push people through the funnel, but what if you took a step back? At Bearaby, by introducing mindfulness into the buying process and asking people how they feel throughout the process of a sale, the company was able to build trust with its customers, understand the behavior of people who returned products, and increased the overall net promoter score of the brand.
• Making it Work: As a small, independent, DTC business, being agile and having the ability to accelerate a product are assets. But when you expand and begin to take on retail partnerships, your internal processes need to adjust. Rather than thinking a month of two ahead, you need to fit into a production timeline that is already planned two years in advance. To do that, it’s critical to have the right backend operations in order to analyze data and manage inventory so you can meet the needs of your partners.
• Stop Selling, Start Connecting: Most brands see social media and SMS messaging as tools to sell products and get information to customers about deals or products. But what if you used those platforms to be a resource to your customers and offered them help in ways unrelated to your products? Bearaby took this road when establishing itself on social media and found that sparking natural conversations led to more curiosity about the brand overall, and subsequently led to sales with truly engaged customers.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hello everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Kathrin Hamm, the CEO and founder of Bearaby. Kathrin, welcome.

Kathrin:

Thanks so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Tell me a bit about Bearaby. I was looking at your website, I saw how amazing your weighted blankets look. They're knitted, they're awesome. I have a couple other weighted blankets, but they are nowhere near that, so tell me a little bit about the company and how you thought about creating it.

Kathrin:

The idea of creating Bearaby was really when I had sleep problems myself. I used to work for the World Bank as an economist, and I was just traveling a lot. I just had moved from Washington to the Middle East, and then from the Middle East to India, all within two years. I was traveling a lot and I was never a good sleeper, but this constant travel and jet lag really put me over the top. So I was just looking for a nat...