D2C Brand Builds Loyalty Offline, Gets New Customers In-Store

For brands relying on senses that cannot be communicated via eCommerce — smell, taste, touch — it can be difficult to build a pure-play direct-to-consumer (D2C) audience.

Broken Top Candle Company is addressing this problem by leveraging brick-and-mortar stores to draw in new customers, while utilizing its D2C channels to promote long-term loyalty. In an interview with PYMNTS, Affton Coffelt, founder of the candle brand, spoke to the difficulties the company has faced in the last few years as it has built out its D2C shop.

“It’s hard to smell a candle through a screen, so we definitely had some challenges in the beginning,” Coffelt said. “[For] brands that have a retail presence where consumers can be in Whole Foods, be in stores, smell the product and purchase it, then online platforms for candle brands become more of a returning customer base, if you will. … It’s a great resurfacing platform, instead of having to go into a retailer and find the brand again.”

She estimated that, for Broken Top Candle Company, an average of more than 40% of monthly customers are returning shoppers.

D2C customers need to have trust in what they are buying, according to The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Online Features Driving Consumers to Shop With Brands, Retailers or Marketplaces,” created in collaboration with Adobe and drawing from a survey of more than 3,500 U.S. consumers.

A plurality of consumers making purchases from a brand’s own website or mobile app — 15% — cited trust in the store as the most influential factor in selecting the type of store at which they made all or most of their purchases in the last 30 days. This share is far greater than the portion of customers making purchases from an online marketplace or from a retailer’s website or mobile app who said the same.

Broken Top Candle Company’s D2C platform also gives it the tools to reward ongoing loyalty, driving more value from consumers who already like the product.

“We’ve seen a lot of engagement with [highly loyal] consumers in our subscription side of the business,” Coffelt said. “Everything in our product line is consumable, which makes it easy on a reorder cadence. Right now, we do a little bit of customer segmentation, offer them our text message club, for example. We call it our VIP.”

She noted that these consumers get early access to new products and deals.

Finding ways to win the spending of this highly valuable demographic can be key to brands’ success, especially in the subscription space. The 2023 report “The Subscription Commerce Readiness Report: The Loyalty Factor,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and sticky.io, dubs this group the “loyalists,” noting that these 30% of retail subscribers generate 79% of total revenue across the retail subscription space.

Looking ahead, the brand aims to further drive revenue from this group with a “tiered-value” loyalty program of some sort, looking for the best way to “support those VIP buckets” and keep them coming back.

“That has been a huge North Star for me within the last six to eight months,” Coffelt said.