Yankee Candle

INTRO

Reigniting a leading fragrance brand

It’s hard to imagine any retail brand today that doesn’t have their own loyalty program of some kind, ushering every person to join in hopes of keeping the brand in people’s minds.

That’s exactly what Yankee Candle, the once leading brand in fragrance, was looking to build. The program was to be at the forefront of their brand, enticing customers to engage more with its products and increasing recurring revenue.

With this goal, I personally led the creation of Yankee Candles first ever Rewards program, focusing on product strategy and user experience.

GOAL

Designing for retail and online stores, for existing and new customers

With a very large and loyal but traditional customer base who only prefer the brick and mortar physical retail experience, we were tasked to create a singular program that can both hold onto the existing customers, but also attract new ones as well.

We first compiled all of their user research data (which they had a ton of, but seemingly random and disorganized), and sorted them into crucial bits, usable for this project.

It was important for us to start sorting the data into a journey, in order to give us insight to see at which point we can target and introduce the program most effectively. This will tell us what type of information we will need to include in the program.

RESEARCH

The journey

I organized their data and created a user journey for the entire product cycle. From having the need for a fragrance product to choosing a brand to product use to post use. From physical retail journey to online retail journey.

The first problem we ran into was that even though we had available to use vast swaths of data from their own research team, it was mostly for their physical retail experiences and almost nothing for their online presence.

That led us to the second problem, it was that their online presence was almost non-existent. Sure it had all the basics of an online retailer, but what it lacked was an inherent problem with the product itself:

Finally our goal became much clearer, we needed to build a loyalty program that itself will drive both retail and online purchases.

SOLUTION

People love to be rewarded

After what seemed like countless rounds of discussions and ideations, we finally nailed down the solution.

We worked with the YC internal team to create a fragrance quiz that will hone in on a particular user’s fragrance category and style, from then we used that result as a starting point to issue rewards and product suggestions.

Altogether, the quiz allowed us to achieve 3 main goals

WIREFRAMES & DESIGN

Simplicity is key

To build the main page of the loyalty program, it needed to be simple, with all the information on one page that are quick and glanceable. Early wireframes were taken to Yankee Candle headquarters in Chicago for extensive user testing and focus group sessions that lasted for 3 days.

In the end, we condensed the page into 5 mains sections

HANDOFF

The final pitch

It was time to gather all of the stakeholders in one room and give the final presentation. It was the Yankee Candle team, the Newell Brand team, the OrderGroove team and of course our home team from Wunderman Thompson.

The clients were amazed, especially they have never had a working prototype built for a presentation before, and all of them were able to interact with the demo itself. The wireframes were handed off, to be refined by their internal team for final designs and development.

IMPACT

Even during COVID?

The program launched March 2020, and within 5 months, was able to increase Yankee Candle’s over all recurring revenue by 343%, and this was during the period where COVID was most serious, affecting all industries.