Purity Coffee Fixed Loyalty Friction and Doubled Redemptions with Skio

A Coffee Company That Runs on Science

Purity Coffee sells the cleanest coffee it can make. Founder Andrew Salisbury started the company in 2016 after his wife's health scare sent him digging through coffee research at Vanderbilt's Institute of Coffee Studies; he came back convinced that how coffee is sourced, roasted, and tested changes what it does to your body. Purity now tests every batch for mold, pesticides, and mycotoxins, roasts to protect antioxidants, and operates as a Certified B Corporation and Public Benefit Corporation. It has made the Inc. 5000 multiple years running.

Most of that business is built on subscription. Coffee is a habit; people reorder the same beans on a schedule, and Purity rewards them for it with a loyalty program: five points per dollar, points for reviews and referrals, tier rewards, birthday credits. Megan Bolin manages support, which means she sees every place the program rubs customers the wrong way. When loyalty breaks, it lands in her queue first.

Smile Wasn't Built for Subscribers

The loyalty program ran on Smile, and for Purity's subscription-heavy base, the redemption flow was the weak point. Redeeming points on a subscription order was clunky enough that a large share of subscribers simply didn't do it. The numbers make the gap obvious: during the Smile era, only 32% of reward redemptions came from subscription orders, even though subscriptions were 77% of all orders. Purity's biggest customer segment was earning points and leaving them on the table.

The friction was structural. Smile lived in a widget off to the side, rewards were issued as codes, and points redeemed only in fixed increments of 100; a subscriber with 597 points could spend 500 and the rest sat stranded. The support queue showed it. Two complaints kept surfacing: subscribers who couldn't access their points at all, and subscribers who couldn't apply them to a subscription order. People wrote in confused about codes they'd earned and lost and balances they couldn't reconcile. Smile came up before subscriptions were a category, so none of this was a Smile failure so much as a mismatch: a loyalty tool bolted onto a subscription business it was never designed for.

Loyalty That Lives Inside the Subscription Portal

Purity moved loyalty to Skio on April 1, 2026, and the fix was less about new features than about location. Skio builds loyalty into the subscription platform itself, so points live in the same portal where subscribers already manage their orders. No widget, no separate login, no codes to track down. A subscriber sees their balance and applies it with one click on the order they're already editing.

The mechanics changed too. Points convert at one cent each and redeem to the exact amount, so the stranded-balance problem disappears; customers can spend every point they have. Tier rewards now post as account credit instead of codes, which ends the "I earned a $20 reward two years ago and lost the code" support thread for good. Purity migrated the program roughly as-is, which means the change came from fixing the plumbing, not from redesigning the program.

Less Friction, Twice the Redemptions

The two stories reinforce each other. On the support side, the complaints tied directly to the old cross-platform friction eased after the move: the categories covering subscribers who couldn't access their points, and those who couldn't add points to a subscription, both fell, with access problems dropping sharply. Once points lived in the portal subscribers already used, the reasons they'd been writing in mostly went away.

On the usage side, the response was immediate. On matched 76-day windows before and after the switch, redeeming orders climbed from 43.9 a day on Smile to 87.0 a day on Skio; a 98% increase, on equal time frames, with effectively the same program. The thing Purity was trying to fix responded almost at once.

The retention signal ties it together. Subscribers who use their loyalty credits hold a 94.3% active subscription rate, against 44.9% for those who don't; a 49 percentage point gap between members who engage with loyalty and members who ignore it. For a business where 77% of orders are subscriptions, getting more people to use their points is a retention lever, not just a loyalty nicety.

Purity is 77 days in, and the infrastructure problem is solved while the behavior change is still building. Redemption rate sits at 1.8% with a median 49 days to first redemption, and subscriber adoption is early by design. Next on Megan's list: a segmented cancel flow with loss-aversion prompts that warn subscribers what points they'd forfeit, plus surprise-and-delight rewards. Purity's largest segment now has a loyalty program that finally works the way they buy.