Doe Lashes: Effortless Onboarding in 30 Minutes

Doe is a rapidly growing DTC beauty brand bringing eyelash extensions, handcrafted from Korean silk hair, to the American market. After launching in 2019, Doe saw 1,000x growth in its first year alone through successful influencer partnerships and viral TikTok campaigns.

Today, the brand has lofty plans to expand into skincare, serums, and more. We sat down with Doe founder Jason Wong to run through subscription growing pains, why he decided to switch from Recharge, and how he evaluates new eCommerce tools in his brand’s tech stack.

“Skio was a no-brainer for us. Zero friction along every step of the way.”

The Early Days: Flawed Tooling & Scant Support

Prior to Skio, Doe ran their subscriptions on Recharge and encountered blockages on a number of fronts, primarily due to the large size of the company and correlating lack of support.

Jason’s team, in his words, prefers being able to directly touch base with the operators or founders of the tools in their tech stack in order to help drive product design and growth.

Establishing points of contact with Recharge, for Doe’s administrative team as well as their consumers, was incredibly challenging.

Along similar lines, the team felt the speed of innovation for Recharge’s platform couldn’t keep up with their ideal pace, likely due to the bureaucratic slowdown of shipping new features that typically occurs within larger companies.

Additionally, Doe users reported difficulty — often in the form of countless customer support tickets — with Recharge’s subscription flow, indicative of a larger UI/UX design flaw.

From a high level, customers struggled to modify subscriptions after placing their orders and, as a result, users would churn completely instead of just adjusting the subscription to their needs.

“Recharge just wasn’t cutting it for us. Ranging from UI and support issues to basic product functionality flaws, it was just a complete mess.”

Making the Jump: Dropping Recharge for Skio

While conducting a monthly audit of their tech stack, the Doe team found their subscription growth rate under Recharge to be frustratingly low, while their churn rate was concerningly high.

After evaluating the reasons for this subscription flatline — namely unintuitive UI/UX and poor customer support — they decided Doe needed a fresh platform led by a hyper communicative team that could remove growth hurdles and proactively optimizes for their subscriber success.

Enter Skio. In Jason’s words, migrating Doe’s data and operations from Recharge to Skio was a seamless onboarding process that took roughly half an hour from start to finish.

“The end-to-end onboarding flow took 30 minutes. I didn’t even lift a finger.”

Moving Forward: Ramping Subscription Growth

After onboarding with Skio, Doe has seen healthier subscription growth rates month over month, significantly lower churn, and, overall, more positive responses to the new subscription portal.

There are a number of components of Skio’s platform which have contributed to the sense of seamlessness in customer experience that the Doe team was striving for.

For instance, users can essentially self-service rather than turn to customer support. This is due to Skio’s passwordless login and simple dashboards, which allow subscribers to easily retool their own preferences — both small-scale features that have aided in long-term retention.

These improvements have also allowed the Doe team to redirect their time and focus from answering endless support inquiries towards building the brand’s broader product catalog.

According to Jason, subscriptions comprise about 2% of Doe’s total revenue, a metric they hope to boost substantially within the next year to a figure fit for a highly replenishable DTC brand.

Not only does the team plan on doubling down on subscriptions by potentially adding new incentives for purchase and options for restock cycles, but they’ll also continue to work directly with the Skio team to jam on all the platform possibilities that can help execute their ultimate vision.

“Skio’s been a net positive for us across every function. Critically, the ability to speak directly to the team has alleviated stress and wasted time.”