“We are confident in sending our customers to Loop’s platform because it consistently provides a great shopping experience,” says Mike Wu, Director of Customer Happiness at Monos.

Overview

Monos is a travel and luggage company focused on delivering high-quality travel goods at affordable prices. 

Founded in 2018 by Hubert Chan, Victor Tam, and Daniel Shin, Monos touts itself as the only climate neutral-certified luggage brand. The name Monos was inspired by the Japanese concept of “mono no aware” – the profound appreciation of the beauty in fleeting moments; a fitting name, of course, for a premium travel goods company.

Monos’ design philosophy less is more is embodied by their luggage collections’ simple and sleek design. This is juxtaposed with their obsession with high-quality materials that last.

Today, Monos makes premium quality travel goods accessible to everyone. Most high-end luxury luggage is typically priced well out of reach of the average person, ranging from $700 to over $1,000 USD. They use the same or better materials and factories as these brands, but offer their luggage for a fraction of the price.

They believe that genuine human connection and understanding are the keys to traveling well, doing good business, and living a good life – another key reason sustainability matters to them.

Since partnering with Loop, Monos’ achieved:

• 23% additional retained revenue
• $21 average upsell per return
• Higher customer satisfaction
• Improved environmental initiatives
  

“It’s comforting to know when a customer initiates a return they’ll be taken care of,” says Wu.

Challenge

During their initial market research, they saw a huge gap in the luggage space – they believe there are three pillars when it comes to travel and luxury: design, quality, and price. 

They felt most companies hit one or two of these criteria, but they wanted to hit all three and add a fourth one, sustainability.

That’s exactly what they did.

However, they soon realized that if they were to achieve their goal of honoring all four pillars, they needed to consider the entire customer journey – including returns.

Originally, they were processing their returns manually. It was costly, both from a financial and customer happiness perspective, not to mention from a sustainability standpoint, too. 

Their manual returns were time consuming and difficult to manage, plus they had no real data on returns – nor their environmental impact.

Customers were becoming increasingly frustrated due to delayed returns and their inability to self-process them, and their lack of customizable return rules kept Monos’ policies rigid – that’s when they turned to Loop.

Solution

Upon reviewing the entire returns landscape, Loop stood out above the rest – and once they onboarded to our exchange-first platform, they saw an immediate impact.

Their returns went from manual to automated, empowering their customers to self-process their returns easily. They gained access to reliable returns data that enables them to make better informed business decisions, and realized they could track their environmental impact.

The Monos team was also drawn to three of Loop’s additional features: Instant Exchange, Insights, and Shop Now.

• Instant Exchange enables Monos to offer their customers instant exchanges, risk-free. When a customer elects Instant Exchange, Monos ships their exchange item prior to the customer shipping their return item back – this is risk-free to Monos, since they place a hold-charge on the customer’s credit card until they receive their item back.
  
  

• Insights is a powerful tool that grants access to in-depth data around return reasons, customer behavior, and operations – all of which is uniquely leveraged by Monos to scale their business and to understand their environmental impact, an added bonus since they’re so focused on sustainability.
  
  “Loop supports our sustainability efforts a great deal. We are Climate Neutral Certified and members of 1% for the Planet. Participating in these programs requires us to track and offset our carbon footprint and environmental impact; without Loop, we wouldn’t have the accurate, reliable data we get today,” says Wu.
  
  

• Shop Now seals the deal since it empowers customers to shop across Monos’ entire real-time inventory when considering a product exchange, leading to a seamless exchange process with endless potential for upsells.
  
  

They’ve also seen increased customer happiness thanks to our self-serve portal and real-time inventory tracking for exchanges. Plus, our customizable return rules granted them the flexibility they needed to reward their best customers while creating unique return experiences.

“We’re thankful for the Loop team for supporting us in any which way possible to grow and scale our business,” says Wu.