How innerwear brand Bummer focused on customer retention to achieve and sustain success

“We have seen all apparel categories getting disrupted from a very fashion-forward perspective and my intuition back in 2018 was that underwear was one category that still had a scope of disruption,” said Sulay Lavsi, Founder, Bummer.

Lavsi comes from a family that has owned a textile and apparel business for a very long time. So, the interest in the industry came naturally to him. Having spent two years in the United States, he learned tailoring and pursued garment manufacturing.

“When I looked up underwear on Amazon, I could only see Jockey on the first 3-4 pages, which really puts a lot into perspective. Even the consumer has not experimented with trying out different brands when it comes to underwear. So, Bummer was born to essentially introduce a fashion element in the category,” he says.

Using retention to drive growth

Founded in 2020, Bummer has grown almost 12 times in three years. Being featured on Shark Tank feature did boost sales, but customers staying loyal after the hyper-sales period helped the brand make a mark in the industry.

“I did not think of retention as an important aspect to factor in before we had a very large customer base. Our initial focus was a lot on email marketing, WhatsApp messaging etc,” Lavsi says.

“Looking back, whatever we've done with retention, we now know that you don't really need a large consumer base to build retention as a channel. Even if you have 5,000 consumers, if you are able to bring them back every month, that makes a solid business,” he says.

Building with WebEngage

WhatsApp marketing was expensive while email marketing did not really help Bummer up their revenue numbers. This is when WebEngage's Startup Program came into the picture.

“WebEngage Startup Program helped us with a centralised dashboard, tracking end-to-end engagement across channels of communication. It has been a gratifying experience so far. And, what I think is incentivising is the free credits provided to early stage startups like ours. It gives brands enough time and space to experiment with different features,” Lavsi says.

Working with WebEngage helped Bummer build multi-channel journeys. SMS as a channel proved to be an effective mode of communication between the brand and the customers.

“One of our biggest learnings while working with WebEngage was that retention campaigns have the ability to convince customers to buy your product when they don’t even need one,” the founder says.

Lavsi plans to take Bummer offline in the next few months. “We are set to launch a couple of our offline stores across malls and airports. We are also doing R&D in terms of building innovative and sustainable fabric,” he says.

The cost of acquiring new customers for businesses is significantly high, which is why more companies are now investing in retention marketing tools.

This story is the third in a series called Retentioneering, where new-age startups share with us their experience of working with the WebEngage Startup Program and how it helped them with various retention efforts.