Underoutfit’s Story

Underoutfit is an innovative Activewear & Underwear brand, with products designed in New York City, and shipped from its warehouses in New York State and California. With eco-friendly, ethical factories around the world, the brand sources only the highest quality materials.

Through its innovative yarn technology, Underoutfit has revolutionized the Activewear & Underwear industry and expanded its customer base across the US. With the growth of the brand, return and exchange rates also increased.

The Challenge

One of the main challenges for activewear & underwear stores is to help customers find the perfect fit, especially first-time customers who may find it difficult to determine what size they need through a computer screen. To encourage customers to try on items at home, Underoutfit offers 180 days of free returns, including for washed items.

Resulting in the following two challenges:
1. A high return rate due to an incorrect first impression of product sizes.
2. Once a product has been taken out of its packaging, it is considered worn and cannot be restocked.

Underoutfit looked for a solution for those challenges while keeping in mind shipping costs, which they considered high in the US, and the customer experience – providing the best customer experience possible.

Why Underoutfit Chose ReturnGO

Underoutfit’s co-founder and CXO, Felix Leshno, identified that ReturnGO’s return solution was well-suited to help startups like his develop innovation. For his company, he envisioned a way to use ReturnGO features in a creative way such as incentivizing customers with ‘Store Credit’ and extracting insights from return data of which products are profitable.

ReturnGO’s ‘Donate the Item’ and ‘Keep the Item’ resolutions are key differentiators in Underoutfit’s decision to use ReturnGO. These resolutions enable Underoutfit to encourage customers to try on items to see if they fit without the hassle and cost of handling return shipping for non-restockable items.

Underoutfit offers ‘Store Credit’ as an incentivize for customers to donate or keep non-restockable items such as gently-worn briefs instead of shipping them back.

For items that can be shipped back and restocked, Underoutfit was able to take advantage of the wide range of shipping carrier and aggregator integrations offered by ReturnGO, eventually choosing to integrate with Shippo, an aggregator that specializes in the US, as it best suited Underoutfit’s needs.

How Underoutfit Uses ReturnGO

Underoutfit manages returns and exchanges on a regular basis using ReturnGO. As Underoutfit has grown rapidly over the last few years, the company’s main KPIs are the number of full refunds given and the amount of resources spent on customer service, as well as the costs of return shipping and handling.

Underoutfit’s favorite ReturnGO feature is ‘Instant Credit’, as it isn’t natively available on Shopify, and Shopify’s alternative of gift cards didn’t meet Underoutfit’s needs.

Underoutfit uses features such as ‘Keep the Item’, ‘Donate the Item’, ‘Variant Exchange’, and ‘Store Credit’ to optimize their return policy.

Through ReturnGO’s deep integration with Shippo, Underoutfit experiments with Shippo’s shipping configurations, leading to a more efficient return shipping process.

The Results

• 25.6% Decrease in Refunds Since Offering ‘Store Credit’.
  Within 1 year, since offering ‘Store Credit’ as a return resolution, Underoutfit has seen a 25.6% decrease in refunds, while sales and RMAs have increased.
  Another factor contributing to the decreased refund rate is the use of ‘Variant Exchange’, which now accounts for 19.8% of all Underoutfit returns. These results demonstrate the value of offering multiple return resolution options. 

• 16.4% New Revenue from Redeemed ‘Store Credit’.
  When Underoutfit customers redeem their ‘Store Credit’, more than 51% spend more money, generating an average of 16.4% additional revenue. This makes ‘Store Credit’ a valuable option to offer customers.

• Reduced Reverse Logistics Costs.
  Underoutfit has saved significant costs and reduced the environmental impact of its supply chain by offering ‘Donate the Item’ and Keep the Item return resolutions, which helped reduce unnecessary shipments for non-restockable items.

• Increased Customer Satisfaction & Reduced Customer Support Costs.
  Since implementing an easy return process with ‘Store Credit’, easy exchanges, and ‘Keep the Item’ resolutions, Underoutfit customer support requests have decreased almost completely, saving the company thousands of dollars a month.

By using ReturnGO’s returns management system, Underoutfit has benefitted from reduced costs, increased efficiency, and higher retained revenue. Underoutfit continues to use ReturnGO to constantly optimize its returns process, improve the customer experience, and track return analytics.