Recurly Helps Tailor Brands Make Branding Accessible Worldwide
Overview
Imagine you’re a small business and you need to create your brand identity, starting with your logo. What if you could design a new, unique logo on the spot—one that fits your business, its mission, and brand image? With Tailor Brands’ online platform you can! From logo design to presentations and even entire brands, they’ve got you covered.
Tailor Brands is a team of experts committed to streamlining the branding process for small businesses. The company was founded on the belief that powerful branding should be accessible to everyone, regardless of skill level, background in design, or budget size. As a result, they’ve created a platform that will “take the wings of any business’s story and turn it into a brand that can fly.” In short, Tailor Brands is the world’s first automated branding agency.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
Tailor Brands offers a subscription-based service and currently counts over seven million customers worldwide. According to Maayan Kotler, VP of Marketing at Tailor Brands, the company is “reshaping the creative industry by teaching computers how to design, write, copy, and even plan strategy.” Tailor Brands’ target audience is small business owners, freelancers, consultants, design agencies—basically anybody who needs to build a brand and promote a business.
To create each unique custom logo, the company relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand the brand identities and elements preferred by different industries.
This helps the platform understand what types of designs are more likely to work for the user’s industry. The platform also creates a series of “this or that” choices as a means to begin to understand each user’s preferences. Together, these processes enable the system to intelligently create design elements that are the best match for each user’s needs.
We needed flexible payment models, and not all the platforms had that. We knew we needed a platform with an intuitive and easy-to-use API. It was also really important that the platform offers an exceptional user experience, both for customers and our staff.
Building Momentum With the Subscription Model
Tailor Brands relies on the subscription model to monetize their business, with three plan options: the most basic is centered on the logo design and the things related to the logo, while the highest tier includes automating a business’ social presence and much more.
When looking for a subscription management platform, the company had certain key criteria, according to Kotler. “We needed flexible payment models, and not all the platforms had that. We knew we needed a platform with an intuitive and easy-to-use API. It was also really important that the platform offers an exceptional user experience, both for customers and our staff. Finally, we needed a sophisticated dunning process—and we were most impressed with Recurly’s dunning.”
Another key, according to Kotler, relates to Tailor Brands’ global expansion. “Not all companies work with every currency. The fact that Recurly supports a number of different currencies definitely gives us a competitive edge over other companies in our space.”
Promoting Global Expansion
Tailor Brands relies on Recurly to help the company expand globally. Recurly supports more than 30 global currencies. Accepting payment in the local currency is a key to achieving high customer conversion and transaction success rates. “The ability to accept different currencies was very important for us in supporting our global expansion,” notes Kotler. “We know that potential customers want to pay in their local currency, and we appreciate that Recurly supports so many global currencies and payment methods.”
Tailor Brands also utilizes Recurly’s coupon function to run numerous campaigns that seek to both convert new subscribers and encourage current subscribers to renew and upgrade. “The coupon function is incredibly easy to use and gives us another method to increase conversions,” says Kotler.
We know that potential customers want to pay in their local currency, and we appreciate that Recurly supports so many global currencies and payment methods.
Solving Challenges With Custom Fields and Webhooks
Tailor Brands uses Recurly’s custom fields to show the subscription plan code on the checkout page. “The custom fields function is great! It solves a problem that might seem somewhat simple, but it’s actually a really important piece of data for us to have and display. The data team uses it for other purposes as well,” remarks Kotler. “And webhooks are great. We use them a lot for managing our users’ subscriptions status.”
Processing Payments Successfully
As a high-volume business, the ability to successfully process a large number of transactions is key to Tailor Brands’ subscriber retention. When recurring transactions fail, this can lead to involuntary churn and the loss of both current as well as future revenue from that subscriber.
Anything related to our revenue is obviously very significant. So, our ability to ensure that our payment processing works smoothly and is effective was critical. This is the most important benefit Recurly gives us.
Effective Decline Management
To address payment failures, Recurly offers robust and sophisticated decline management techniques, which include automated retries, an account updater service, and dunning.
“These features are at the core of any SaaS management,” notes Kotler. “Battling involuntary churn is one of the main pain-points any SaaS business faces, mainly because this type of churn does not reflect the product’s performance. This makes it difficult to address without having expertise in the world of payments. Each of Recurly’s decline management features alone would have taken us significant time and resources to develop and optimize. By using Recurly for subscription management, these capabilities are included with near-zero work on our side.”
Recurly’s decline management techniques are able to recover significant amounts of revenue each month that might otherwise be lost. Using these techniques, in 2018 the revenue Recurly recovered for Tailor Brands was over five times the total amount the company paid to Recurly for its service.
An Enduring Partnership in SaaS Business Success
As a Recurly customer since 2017, Tailor Brands recognizes the many benefits they get from having chosen Recurly as their subscription management platform. “We have enjoyed working with you and look forward to many more productive years with Recurly,” says Kotler.
Each of Recurly's decline management features alone would have taken us significant time and resources to develop and optimize. By using Recurly for subscription management, these capabilities are included with near-zero work on our side.
Download the Case Study: Tailor Brands
