How Philip Kingsley realized their subscription vision after migrating from a homegrown system

Philip Kingsley is a haircare brand rooted in trichology — the science of hair and scalp — and in the belief that healthy hair can change your life. To that end, they not only offer clinical hair services on-site in London and New York, but also give people around the world access to their proprietary shampoos and conditioners on their retail sites.

Like many of today’s fastest-growing brands, the team at Philip Kingsley decided to launch subscriptions on their Adobe Commerce retail site with the goals of achieving more recurring revenue, earning factions of loyal customers — and getting a leg up on the industry’s competition — in mind. 

But their vision proved to be difficult to actualize with their first subscription solution. 

“We had this homegrown solution that we had built from the ground up internally that didn’t give us the scalability that we needed to grow the subscription business,” said Lauren Duncan, Head of eCommerce at Philip Kingsley. “But it also was really limiting for us and our customers in terms of the functionality they had access to.”

Soon it was clear that they’d have to upgrade their homegrown solution to best-in-class technology to make subscriptions as powerful as they could be for their business. 

“We needed something that was going to be able to scale and grow with us — that was easy for us to set up and implement, and that’s really where Ordergroove came into play,” Lauren said.

It began with their smoothest migration on record

Beyond the out-of-the-box features built for scale, Philip Kingsley selected Ordergroove as their next subscription solution for expert support throughout the migration process, and beyond. 

“We had the benefit of Ordergroove working with a number of the beauty retailers in that space,” Lauren said. “There was so much learning that we could take from the Ordergroove team when looking at how to strategize and how to optimize our subscription plans.”

And Ordergroove’s subscription experts made sure they were set up for success from the moment they migrated all of their subscribers over with a 100% success rate. 

“It was one of the smoothest integrations that we’ve ever had — especially because it was such a complex project,” said Lauren. 

Among those complexities was the challenge of managing a migration with stakeholders spread across time zones — with Philip Kingsley in the UK and their web development agency in Eastern Europe — but Ordergroove made it easy by setting up a range of communication channels and acting as an extension of the Philip Kingsley team along the way. 

“From an efficiency perspective and a development perspective, we should have migrated over a lot sooner,” Lauren said. “We would’ve saved a lot of revenue in terms of building out and developing that homegrown solution, which took us far longer to do for much less in return.”

Shifting focus from subscriber support to subscription innovation

Before switching to Ordergroove, there was a recurring theme across Philip Kingsley’s customer inquiries: Subscribers were frustrated about having to contact support to make any type of change to their subscription orders.

They weren’t the only ones feeling the effects of a limited subscriber experience, either — making those changes on subscribers’ behalf also ate up significant customer care bandwidth.

“Ordergroove has completely automated all of that,” said Lauren, “which has really freed our resources up to focus on growing the business or adding those extra value activities that our customer care team can do with our customers.”

Philip Kingsley’s web development resources also got plenty of bandwidth back after switching to Ordergroove, empowering them to move much quicker on the innovative subscription experiences they wanted to activate — and even test out variations along the way.

“We’ve got quite a complex setup with our hair loss subscription service in terms of the frequencies and the product quantities associated with those frequencies,” Lauren said.

Thankfully, Ordergroove gave them the flexibility to replicate the subscription offering they built with their homegrown solution. That way they could avoid any disruptions for their existing subscribers, “but also scale and test new frequencies with our customers to see what resulted in the best average order value, lifetime value, and what kept customers coming back for the longest time frame,” said Lauren.

A world class subscriber experience fuels more recurring revenue — and a virtuous cycle of improvements

You could say that switching to Ordergroove put Philip Kingsley back on track to achieve their initial subscription vision — but also kickstart a virtuous cycle of ongoing improvements, fueled by recurring revenue.

“Being able to give the power back to the customers and really enable them to manage it on their own has really helped us to reduce our cancellations from our subscriptions,” said Lauren, “Which just goes in line with all of our customer experience objectives to make sure we’re giving the very best-in-class experience across all areas of the business — which now includes our subscriptions.”

And now, they can put the significant resources they once needed in the day-to-day to manage their subscriptions to use in new ways that maximize recurring revenue and profitable growth.

“Ordergroove is one of the core pillars in our recurring revenue growth strategy,” Lauren said. “We’re relying very much on forecasting that recurring revenue and building up that lifetime value with our customers.”

As it turns out, more recurring revenue means more to invest back into a world class subscriber experience.

“Using something like Ordergroove has made that super easy for us to do because it’s giving us so much flexibility as to what subscription services we can offer our customers,” said Lauren.

Surpassing the competition with a standout subscription experience

The team at Philip Kingsley chose the perfect time to level up their subscription experience with fierce competition and consumer price sensitivity at an alltime high in the beauty space.

And they knew that, done right, subscriptions could elevate them from being just another purchasing option — and transform them into consumers’ go-to brand for hair care.

“Having a subscription platform where we can give subscribers added value or long-term discounts for staying loyal to us is beneficial for us as a growing business because it improves our profit margins,” Lauren said, “But it also supports our retention strategy.”

Which is a pretty big deal when customer acquisition costs have soared 222% over the last decade.

Despite challenging market conditions, the team at Philip Kingsley has found that Ordergroove continues to give them a leg up on the competition by retaining customers for longer, improving repeat purchase rates — and ultimately setting a new highwater mark for customer lifetime value.

So, any other ambitious brands currently operating with a homegrown subscription solution might want to take note —

“I would definitely recommend anyone on a homegrown solution to migrate to Ordergroove,” said Lauren. “Not only does it enable you to scale much quicker when you’re looking at growing that recurring revenue for the business, but also the functionality that it gives you out-of-the-box is much greater than what you can achieve from a homegrown solution.”