Customer Loyalty as the Key Ingredient for Success
How quality products, authentic partnerships, and meaningful experiences come together to create brand loyalty among consumers
Repeat customers are the heart and soul of just about every business. But when your product is something that you purchase maybe two or three times throughout your life, how do you create a repeat experience that will sustain your company long-term? That was one of the questions that Chip Malt had to answer when he co-founded Made In Cookware. And the solution he came up with was a good one: produce the highest quality products possible, partner with industry bigwigs, deliver an all-around experience that goes beyond those products, then keep scaling to bring more must-haves to market.
But that wasn’t always the strategy, and it took some trial and error to actually turn Made In into the success it is today.
“I would love to tell you that we sat in a boardroom and whiteboarded out the perfect strategy and absolutely nailed it off the bat, but that was clearly not the case and that’s not how it played out,” Malt says.
It took some time to get products off the ground and find the right partners who could bring products to market at the rate Made In would need. But throughout the process, Malt says that there was always a guiding principle behind everything the company did.
“Our launching hypothesis was that food is so emotional and people are spending so much money going to a Whole Foods or a farmer’s market and getting super excited about a marvelous grass-fed steak from a local rancher who is 30 miles away, and then they’re coming home and they’re cooking it on a frying pan that’s a hand-me-down that they couldn’t even name the brand of and it’s ruining that steak,” Malt says. “There is this behavioral disconnect from the beginning part of a process and all the care that went into it with the actual cooking at the end of the day, which was delivering the final product. So we wanted to make people care about their cookware in an emotional way as much as they did the ingredients they were grabbing at the farmer’s market.”
That way to do that revealed itself slowly, as partners such as celebrity chefs like Tom Collichio and others brought into the company. With the name recognition these chefs served up, and the idea that cooking should be an enjoyable experience as a guiding light, Malt says that creating an experience-based strategy was the way forward.
“It’s never been easier to order Uber Eats and have any meal you want delivered to your door within 40 minutes at a pretty good price,” Malt says. “But people are cooking more and more, and why is that? It’s because people actually love the process of the creativity behind it, of the expression behind it, of just the sense of accomplishment, or people do it to destress, or they’re doing it for a specific diet. People are doing it for a very personal reason…If we can give you technique and how-tos as opposed to step by step by step recipes with the chefs who have gone to culinary school, who have done all this technique work for you, then it’ll be a really powerful experience for the home consumer.”
That experience is important, but according to Malt, it would still mean nothing if the product at the heart of the brand wasn’t up to snuff.
“If we have only one chip to put it in, we would always put it into the product category because we believe that is what drives behavior,” Malt says. “Everything you launch needs to be a great experience if that is their first product they’ve ever bought. So, don’t launch tail skews that aren’t up to the quality standards that you want, that don’t have the manufacturer and craftsmanship story that you want, that don’t have a good unboxing experience. So we’ve taken that to heart because I think you see a lot of ecommerce companies just launch a whole bunch of stuff really quickly without that thought and attention behind it.”
The strategy has paid off for Malt and Made In. To learn more about how, tune in to Up Next in Commerce.
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