Liah Yoo is on a mission to simplify skincare. As a skincare enthusiast who’s built her audience on YouTube over the years, Liah decided to launch her brand, KraveBeauty, in 2017. In a few years, KraveBeauty has become one of the fastest-growing consumer brands in the beauty space.

KraveBeauty’s early growth priority was to launch a subscription model, enabling them to build deep relationships with their customers increasing customer LTV and loyalty.

We sat down with Andy Chiu, KraveBeauty’s VP of Finance & Operations, to explore why KraveBeauty believes in doubling down on subscriptions to scale their business.

“We believe in intentional growth, especially as we launch new products. Rather than sell 10 products to one person, we’re focused on selling one product to 10 new people, always testing how we can get in front of new customer segments.”

Recharge: An Operational & Financial Nightmare

Andy’s had poor experiences using Recharge before, and he was wary that using it with KraveBeauty would create more headaches for a small, agile team. In his experience, Recharge has two critical flaws that ultimately pushed him away from the platform:

• Recharge requires companies to use multiple payment processors, causing a disjointed customer experience, ultimately a nightmare for accounting and finance to reconcile.
• Recharge creates multiple SKUs in their catalog, making a messy data log for the company using it.

“With most subscription tools, you’re at the bottom of their priority list, especially Recharge. Skio has been a rare exception and always available to help out.”

Skio: Painless Onboarding from Start to Finish

Within a few weeks of Andy and Skio’s first conversation, Skio had fully onboarded KraveBeauty’s subscription offering. This process was much quicker than Andy expected, having worked with other tools and apps in the eComm space.

He acknowledged that a swift onboarding was the result of three factors:

• First, Skio identified potential onboarding hiccups before migrating KraveBeauty over.
• They created a game plan for what and how they would migrate KraveBeauty’s subscriptions.
• Finally, this freed up KraveBeauty’s team to focus on acquiring and upselling new customers.

“Skio’s CX team is top-notch. They’re responsive to all our needs, whether it’s getting their advice on product tweaks or fixing bugs in the software. Skio’s team gives us the white-glove treatment at every turn.”

Skio’s Competitive Advantage 

As a bootstrapped business, KraveBeauty has had to be thoughtful about spending money on new apps and tools. Skio turned is an excellent fit for their small team.

Andy believes that using Skio provides a few competitive advantages for brands like KraveBeauty:

• Flexibility: The ability to add and tweak marketing-related features as they go
• New features: Launching SMS customizations, improving notifications, and upgrading account login page experience.
• Logistics: Integrated updates for 3PLs to receive subscription orders in the same format they handle one-time charges.
• Seamless payments: All payments are processed seamlessly with Shopify, which relieves stress on accounting later on.

“Skio is hands down the simplest subscription tool out there. We migrated over seamlessly, and in the day-to-day, it’s a breeze for our finance and ops team.”

More Orders & Fewer Support Tickets

As KraveBeauty quickly increased its orders, they anticipated seeing a spike in customer support challenges related to their subscription program. Quite the opposite, KraveBeauty’s been surprised to receive few questions from customers about subscriptions.

What’s more, KraveBeauty’s customers have even received positive feedback about KraveBeauty’s subscription program and the customer-facing features Skio’s product offers.

“Working with Skio is too easy. From a customer experience and dashboard standpoint, everything is seamless for our customers and us.”

Leveraging Subscriptions to Drive New Revenue

In KraveBeauty’s first month of launching subscriptions with Skio, 5% of its revenue came from subscriptions. Andy and his team are thrilled with this new revenue stream as they plan to grow that number more steadily in the coming months.

Ultimately, KraveBeauty’s north star is for subscriptions revenue to hit 10 to 20% of overall revenue. 

“We are excited about the features that Skio is rolling out and as we think about how it will impact our business for the better. They’re building features at a pace that you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.”