From build to buy: Why Athena Club moved to Recharge

Athena Club is a personal care one-stop-shop focused on improving the ways people practice personal care. The brand offers high-quality yet affordable products across Body, Skin, Wellness, and Period Care through a convenient subscription service via its direct-to-consumer e-commerce website. Athena Clubs award-winning productssuch as the best-selling Razor Kitare made in partnership with experts using high-quality materials, effective ingredients, and innovative patented technologies.

Challenge

Subscriptions have always been core to Athena Clubs offerings as a subscription-first brand. They wanted to offer high-quality self-care essentials at reasonable prices while also offering flexibility that was hassle-free, so subscriptions was a logical facet in connecting with their customers.

Previously, they utilized a custom-built PHP-based REST API to run their subscriptions, but it quickly became hard to navigate and leverage at the rate that they were growing.

At the end of the day, they needed to find a solution that would reduce the time and effort they were spending in maintaining their subscriptions interface, to allow them a greater capacity to develop new features and scale to the next level.

Solution

They were looking for a robust and scalable API solution to support their customizations. Athena Club ultimately decided to migrate from their homegrown subscription solution to Recharge, as they were attracted by Recharges well-documented and mature API. During the migration process, they were also able to rely on Recharges partner, Absolute Web, who were well equipped to assist in migrating their headless build over to Recharge and ensure a seamless data transfer.

Athena Club implemented a bespoke bundling functionality with the API to create custom subscription bundles that customers could choose from, with discount tiers based on the items their orders contained. With the use of Recharges webhooks, they were able to achieve control over subscriber actions, like managing discount tiers based on whether items were removed or added.

They also revamped their cancellation flowwhere they previously had no deterrent for cancellation in their fully custom customer portalallowing them to offer incentives to help customers with their specific problems and prevent cancellations.

Recharges dunning capabilities have been another prime feature in Athena Clubs retention strategy. They have seen great results by being able to configure how many times they want to retry customers cards after failed charges, and the time between attempts through experimentation with different cadences.

[Various Athena Club body wash products displayed on a bathroom countertop.]Athena Club body wash products and a razor placed on a bathroom countertop.

Results

Through Recharges Account Management program, Athena Club has had access to Recharges roadmap and key stakeholders so that they could have meaningful impact in Recharges ever-growing product. With the insight into the product roadmap, theyve had the ability to provide feedback as a merchant to work on the features that are important to their growth, while also receiving support for any questions they had through regular health checks and data-driven consultation. Plus, with Recharges robust API and Absolute Webs support and experience in custom builds, Athena Clubs migration was smooth and successful. As a result, they experienced zero hours of downtime and a 20% reduction in time spent maintaining their subscriptionsbringing it down to zero hours of subscription program maintenance.

All of these elements combined have contributed to a powerful and comprehensive self-running subscription program, that has allowed Athena Club to shift their focus to optimizing for scale and take their subscription-first business to the next level.