ThirdLove is on a mission to upend the lingerie industry, and bra-buyers are paying attention.
The brand’s commitment to diversity — offering half-cup bra sizing and promoting body positivity in their advertising — has helped them dethrone the once dominant Victoria’s Secret.
“The future is building a brand for every woman, regardless of her shape, size, age, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” said ThirdLove Co-founder Heidi Zak. Zak and her husband Dave Spector founded ThirdLove in 2013. They now boast a team of 350 employees across three locations in California and Argentina.
The lingerie industry has a unique problem when it comes to loyalty programs. As Erica Richey, ThirdLove’s Director of Customer Marketing puts it, “You don’t just buy a bra every month. Many people wear a bra for one to two years before they need to make a repeat purchase, so it’s not realistic to expect someone to spend $600 every single year on bras.”
In addition to a better rewards program, ThirdLove also wanted to revamp their referrals program. The existing program was clunky and hard to use: “It involved copy/pasting discount codes, which led to a lot of customer service tickets, and discouraged shoppers from using the program,” Richey said. ThirdLove knew it was imperative to restructure in a more customer-friendly way.
ThirdLove leveraged Yotpo to build a tiered VIP program that focused on functional perks to deepen customer relationships. Rather than making customers buy a completely new bra drawer every year in order to retain their status, they built tiers that focused on customers’ lifetime spend.
ThirdLove also implemented a referral experience carefully tailored to encourage repeat referrals. “Our goal with referrals was to keep it simple, deploy the program in the highest quality locations onsite, and make it really easy to share and redeem,” said Richey. The new program allowed customers to refer friends via email and SMS and eliminated the need for coupon codes by allowing referrers to accumulate store credit and redeem it directly at checkout.
