Picking a pair of glasses is tough at the best of times, nevermind choosing a pair for someone else. How then do you give someone such a personal item as a gift, without accidentally choosing a pair they won’t like?
Felix Gray decided the answer lay in a simple solution - a highly customizable gift card experience.
About Felix Gray
We spend a lot of time in our day in front of screens and interacting with technology. In many ways it’s unavoidable, but it can result in a number of issues for our health and wellbeing - headaches, eye strain, difficulty sleeping. Enter Felix Gray, a stylish solution focused on improving your digital wellbeing.
Their blue light glasses filter up to 15x more of the most impactful blue light from screens than other lenses, giving your eyes a much needed rest. Effective and backed up by research, they not only offer their range of glasses for prescriptions but also as reading glasses or non-prescription glasses so you can still enjoy the benefits of a healthier relationship with your tech.
Challenges
In Summer 2021, Felix Gray migrated their site from a custom solution to Shopify. Previously, their requirements for their store experience handling prescriptions meant that a custom platform was the best option, but it lacked the scalability they would need to grow and heavily relied on costly developer time. With all the apps available in the Shopify ecosystem, they were able to migrate with ease and retain much of the same functionality they had on their custom platform. That is, except the customization they had for their gift cards.
“We’ve always offered gift cards, however when we switched from our custom platform to Shopify we lost the level of customization we used to offer with our gift cards and it lacked some of the capabilities that for us really drove gift card sales.” Bobby Shomrony, VP of Sales Operations at Felix Gray, told us.
“Right off the bat the Shopify native app lacked the ability to send the gift card to the recipient and include a fun message. Prior to installing Govalo, the only thing a customer could do was buy a gift card, it would then be sent to the customer, and they’d have to forward the redemption code to their recipient. That’s not a great experience, so immediately we looked for a different gift card app.”
With the holiday season fast approaching, it was crucial to find a solution that could deliver the experience they wanted to offer their customers and previously had on their custom platform.
How Govalo Helped
Noticing a steep decline in gift card sales since their migration, the Felix Gray team set to work uncovering what the cause may be. They found that it wasn’t the more obvious answers such as seasonality or timing, but their gift card capabilities and experience. Shortly before the holiday season, they discovered Govalo.
“After reviewing Govalo’s capabilities, it was a perfect match and we were able to get everything up and running prior to Black Friday - our peak season for gift cards. Govalo has been so helpful in maximizing our gift card purchasing experience.”
“Govalo really spoke to us because it has a more personal touch to it. For example, when you open up the gift card modal the first thing you see is “Who’s the lucky recipient?”. Small things like that make the experience special for both the recipient and person buying the gift.
Essentially, it allowed us to deliver the exact experience we wanted using the features Govalo offers - when you want to send a gift card, add a message, re-send or transfer it, check the balance, and so on.”
Beyond the customer facing experience, Govalo also allowed their team to do more internally to help their customers when issues arise with their gift card. Perhaps the email went into the recipient's spam folder, the customer made a typo when they entered the email address, or the email is simply lost. In any case, their team was able to quickly and easily retrieve the details for a speedy resolution.
“Over the holidays we had instances where someone wanted to send a gift card to a grandparent for example, and if that grandparent was a bit less tech savvy and couldn’t find the gift card we could then easily resend it to the original customer. It helps to bridge that technology gap, and we can do these things within the dashboard without having to contact the Govalo support team to assist.”
Results
With their new gift card capabilities, Felix Gray was ready to take the holiday season head on. Since installing Govalo, they’ve seen a 3.5x increase in gift card sales.
The overwhelmingly positive response from both customers and their internal team has meant that rather than only making gift cards a focus on their site seasonally, they plan to experiment more throughout the year and make their gift cards a big part of their store strategy.
“Due to the tremendous success we’ve recently seen, we’re going to conduct some A/B testing on different placements and messaging throughout our site to see what works best. We’re also going to include messaging about gift cards as part of our campaigns around different holidays throughout the year such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. We see gift cards as the best way to gift something like glasses to someone else in a way they’ll appreciate and enjoy.”
