Here’s how Loop’s return data supports Tortuga’s product development so they can deliver high-quality backpacks for their various customer segments.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Fred Perrotta, Co-Founder @ Tortuga
Tortuga is a company dedicated to crafting the best carry-on travel bags and accessories for travelers, using high-quality materials to design comfortable travel backpacks that will last through all their customers’ journeys. The company was founded in 2010 by childhood best friends, Fred Perrotta and Jeremy Michael Cohen, after they struggled with dragging poorly-made luggage on a trip across Europe. They set out on a mission to design a better backpack, and stand behind the promise to ensure that every traveler gets the right fit.
Tortuga started out with a manual returns process, but they realized the process of requiring customers to reach out to support agents to initiate returns took a lot of time that they should be dedicating to answering higher impact, more profitable customer questions, knowing that their returns process could easily be automated.
“We knew right off the bat that it was annoying and not a good process,” says Perrotta. “We looked at just sending everyone a return slip, even though I’m sure that increases returns, but just to get it off our plate and make it easy.”
“Then we started thinking, ‘Can we automate that and just scratch that off and free up our agents’ time, so that if it’s a person answering emails, they’re doing something that only a person can do?”
Once Tortuga Backpacks signed on with Loop, they were able to instantly eliminate the tedium of their manual returns process. With Loop’s Workflows, Tortuga can convert customers to a seamless self-service workflow that makes it simple to get a refund or an exchange for a product they liked better.
As a premium brand, Tortuga wants to guarantee that customers get the right product for them—and with Loop’s ease of returns, they’ve been able to market their return policy, offering customers a 30-day try-at-home period. If a shopper doesn’t like a certain product, they can get a refund or exchange, no questions asked—delivering a superior customer experience that shows customers that they care, without relying on CX resources.
Plus, Loop’s Instant Exchange process “helps us get people from almost the right bag into the actual right bag,” says Perrotta.
The Tortuga team has also found Loop’s Insights feature to be a powerful solution for understanding why returns are taking place. Insights gathers data around product returns and customers’ reasons for making a return or exchange, which the team can analyze to help them identify gaps in their offerings or areas for improvement.
“It’s helpful for us to figure out, ‘can we make a contrasting product that will reduce those returns?’” says Perrotta.
For instance, their flagship award-winning travel backpack offers “all the bells and whistles, more features, and it’s more technical looking. For some people, it’s just too much. They want a material they’re more familiar with even if it’s less technical. So that helps us bundle those up into a separate product that is lighter and cheaper, with more familiar materials.”
As a result of analyzing their returns data, they’ve been able to reverse-engineer a new product called the Travel Backpack Lite that they plan to launch in Q1.
Using Insights “lets us have products that contrast with each other, rather than trying to cover every base with a million variants. We’re trying to cut down that return rate without having to make five SKUs to check all those boxes.”
By partnering with Loop, Tortuga has been able to build a seamless returns process that helps them guarantee customer satisfaction. Moreover, Loop has increased Tortuga’s operational efficiency, has saved them money by reducing costs, and has allowed them to focus on more impactful areas of customer support… all while driving customer satisfaction. Not to mention that, by prioritizing the customer experience, Tortuga Backpacks has been able to build goodwill for their brand that will pay dividends in customer loyalty and referrals.
And using Loop’s Insights feature has given them the data intelligence to optimize their inventory with confidence. They’ve been able to avoid the manufacturing costs of producing new variants that may sit in inventory, and focus on building and enhancing their core product line to ensure they’re creating products that will fly off the warehouse shelves. Plus, Tortuga can use their returns data to help ultimately reduce returns—by understanding which products their customers actually want, and which ones are consistently underperforming.
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