Customers Reward CEO’s Honest Emailed Apology

When olive oil startup Graza botched orders for some customers, its CEO decided to apologize.

Corporate apologies are nothing new, but it was the way Andrew Benin — chief executive and co-founder of Graza — chose to apologize that caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently. It’s also a story that’s playing out at a precarious time for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands.

According to the WSJ report, Benin emailed each of Graza’s 35,444 customers last month after some of them received late and/or damaged bottles of the company’s oil. He offered an apology as well as a discount, with customers praising his human touch, the report said.

Benin told the newspaper he believes in communicating like a person, not “as a business, with a business tone.”

That tone apparently resonated with the year-old company’s customers, 78% of which opened the email, an unusually high rate. A lot of those customers responded, positively so, the WSJ report said: “I won’t be using the discount,” wrote one customer, “but I will be reordering.”

“All you need to do is dig deep, reflect on all the things in marketing and brand communication that piss you off, and do the exact opposite,” Benin said.

PYMNTS has reported a number of times in recent months on this sort of tough decision by D2C CEOs in the name of growing their businesses.

For example, as the “great unsubscribe” rippled through the economy, D2C coffee brand Amora chose to give all the power to its subscribers, CEO Jim Fosina told PYMNTS last month.

“The consumer needs to be in full charge of their subscription,” he said. “If they want to pause, if they want to skip, if they want a refund, we have no-questions-asked policy. Maybe they just didn’t like the bag of coffee. Maybe the bag was ripped. Maybe they just had too much. We’re not going to ask you to send it back. Keep it. Fantastic. Order again when you’re ready.”

When it comes to D2C subscriptions, “the customer just needs to feel like that they can control this as much as they can control their retail shopping,” Fosina said.

Meanwhile, recent reporting by PYMNTS found that young D2C brands that rely on investor funding could have a difficult year ahead of them, as economic conditions grow dire and venture capitalists’ investments and expectations become more conservative.

“[D2Cs] need to be profitable already,” Victor Tam, co-founder and CEO of D2C travel and luggage brand Monos, said in an interview with PYMNTS. “Any company that stopped [being] profitable today is not going to make it [in 2023]. There’s going to be less capital to give them that runway to operate.”

Tam projected that as startups close, D2C brands that have reached profitability will benefit in spite of consumer reluctance, as the competition thins out.

“When you kind of mix in less competition with still some hesitancy in the consumer confidence, I think it’ll balance out for companies that are financially healthy,” he said.