Be like DUER, and make exchanges
easy to save your brand money before
and after the return.
Switch to Loop and make your returns work for you—and your shoppers.
Here’s how DUER recaptures revenue from returns using Instant Exchanges, Shop Now, and more to provide such a great customer experience during the return that they earn upsell value.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
in last twelve months’ upsell revenue
average upsell/return
of customers choose exchanges over returns
in last twelve months’ upsell revenue
average upsell/return
of customers choose exchanges over returns
DUER, the proud purveyor of “the world’s most comfortable pants” is a Canadian lifestyle apparel brand that creates high-performance clothing from plants and recycled materials. Founded in 2014 by Gary Lennett, the brand focuses on fiber-rich products that can effortlessly go from the office to the hiking trails. Since its launch, DUER has expanded from its Canadian roots to build a robust international omni-channel marketing strategy—selling both through online channels and in retail locations across Canada and the United States, with consistent 100% YoY revenue growth.
While the DUER team delighted its customers during the initial customer journey, things fell apart during the post-purchase experience when customers needed to return items. Before implementing Loop, all returns were handled manually.
“It was such a manual process. We didn’t have any data in terms of what product was being returned and for what reason, so there was no product feedback loop,” says Roex. “We were just sending out prepaid return labels for our customer, and then they would send it back.”
Adding to their challenges, DUER only had a warehouse in Canada, so their customers based in the U.S. would need to ship their returns there through a third-party consolidator—which meant that customers could be waiting 30 days for confirmation that their return had been processed. It was an expensive process for DUER, and a clunky one for their customers.
Because there was no way for DUER to process an exchange—they’d have to issue a full refund, then ask the customer to make a brand new order—DUER was losing money on nearly every return. The difficult returns process put a strain on the company’s lone customer support agent, and led to frustrating experiences for their customers. Worse, more often than not, DUER was in the dark about why customers were making returns, eliminating any opportunity to improve the shopping experience.
Previously, very few customers chose to exchange products through DUER’s manual returns process, but today, exchanges and credits represent almost 36% of their returns.
Nearly 18% of customers returning items choose Instant Exchanges, in which they choose a variation of the same product they’d originally purchased. Another 18% choose Shop Now, which offers instant store credit that the customer can apply towards any product in the store.
“The Shop Now feature is awesome,” says Roex. “You get to shop our site in a way that makes it super easy for customers, and encourages upsell to try out new products.”
In fact, the brand has been able to capture over $80,000 in upsell revenue over the last 12 months through the Shop Now feature, with an average $4.48 in upsell per return.
Every month, the ecommerce team exports the data from Loop to analyze trends in returns and the reasons their customers share for why they’re returning a certain item.
“We’re able to identify sizes that are out of tolerance, or something that is fitting a bit tighter than usual, much faster than we ever were before,” says Roex. They can use those insights to update the product page with recommendations to size up on a specific product, for example.
“Loop gives our product team full visibility into why individuals are returning products. That feedback loop is so great.”
And with these customer return insights, DUER worked with their Shopify Plus Design and Development agency partner iamota to create and launch a new site redesign.
A key focus of the redesign was to help shoppers understand DUER’s styles and fits as a means to guide their shopping journey. Knowing everyone’s shopping journey is different, iamota worked with DUER to realign first on the customer messaging that’s delivered on the site about styles and fits.
“It’s common for brands to use ‘internal terminology messaging on their storefront that the brand team understands. Which makes sense because they live and breathe that messaging every day as they build the brand. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that first time shoppers of the brand will understand that messaging as well,” says Siobhan Carr, Strategy Manager at iamota.
Not only does progressively educating the shopper with your messaging provide a better customer experience, but it also provides an opportunity for DUER to build rapport with shoppers. To do this, DUER and iamota focused on recreating the navigation, collection page, PDP, and a detailed fit guide.
Over the past year, even though the brand has grown by more than 100%, DUER has barely needed to scale their customer support team – they’ve gone from one CS team member to 1.5.
“We haven’t expanded the team much because Loop took so much of that need to handle returns away from us,” says Roex.
Automating the returns process eliminates multiple CS touch-points, while improving the customer experience and the efficiency of returns processing—a win-win for all sides.
Moving from a manual returns process to Loop’s exchange-first automated returns management platform has enabled the DUER team to do more with less, much like their products do for their customers.
Loop facilitates seamless returns and exchanges, making it easy to transform returns into exchanges—and even incentivizes upsells to gain more revenue in the process. Loop’s self-service platform effortlessly recaptures revenue with no work involved from the DUER team.
“Loop feels so hands-off, and is able to run and execute in the back end,” says Roex. “It’s the strongest UX experience for a customer I’ve seen.”
Switch to Loop and make your returns work for you—and your shoppers.
Case Studies 
Webinars