When it comes to customization requirements, Shopify DTC brands often face a choice: build a custom solution, or find the right Shopify app to meet the requirements. The custom route is straightforward but expensive; the app route takes time but is easier to manage and lighter on resourcing.
Lilac St. faced this choice for managing box subscriptions on their Shopify store. They initially went the custom route, then later evaluated subscription apps and selected Loop.
Lilac St. shifted their subscription experience from a custom box subscriptions setup on Recharge to Loop Bundles, and migrated subscribers from a custom-built portal to Loop's subscription management portal.
Lilac St. is a beauty brand known for its DIY eyelash extensions, operating on a monthly box subscription model. The leadership team has a technical product background and built much of the initial subscription experience as a custom solution.
In their previous box subscription setup, Lilac St. had a custom UI on their store built on top of Recharge, along with a custom portal for subscription management.
In 2022, Lilac St. migrated from Recharge to Loop.
The team had two priorities going into the migration. First, they wanted to use the native Shopify checkout for subscription orders. Second, they wanted to keep their custom UI design — Loop's APIs powered the subscription box orders on the native Shopify checkout. The Loop team collaborated with Lilac St.'s engineering team on the migration.
Lilac St. was also looking to replace their existing customer portal, and rebuilt a new custom portal using Loop APIs.
The Lilac St. team identified the following priorities for their next subscription setup.
Lilac St. wanted to offer a "Buy more, save more" subscription model, where the price drops as customers add more lash sets to their box order.
New customer portal
Their previous setup did not support staggered discounts in this bundle structure.
Under the previous custom-built portal, each item in a single bundle order was displayed as a separate product. Subscribers found this confusing when making changes to their bundle — adding a new item, editing quantities, or other common edits.
As a result, subscribers often had to raise a ticket with the customer experience team to make routine changes to ongoing box subscription orders. The team wanted a portal where these changes could be made by the subscriber directly.
The team wanted their subscription platform to integrate with the other Shopify apps in their stack — including Gorgias for customer support and Stamped for loyalty. The previous custom portal did not integrate natively with these apps, leaving the support team without centralized subscriber information when resolving tickets.
Implementing new feature requirements on the custom solution required engineering work each time. The Lilac St. team wanted faster iteration on subscription experiments, with less internal engineering time tied up in maintenance.
These were the Loop features the team selected for their setup.
Loop's range bundles let brands offer discounts without setting a maximum item limit in the cart, with different discount tiers based on the number of items added. Lilac St. configured their range bundles to require a minimum of four items in the cart to unlock bundled discount pricing.
Loop Bundles supports adding variants of a SKU inside a bundle. For Lilac St., each eyelash product has size variants — 16mm, 14mm, 12mm, and 10mm — all selectable within the bundle.
Loop's visual editor supports customization without code. The Lilac St. team used it to highlight how the tiered discounting model works to shoppers, and to run experiments on messaging and layout.
Loop Bundles is a packaged product, so Lilac St. did not need to maintain custom code for ongoing changes. For example, bundle page images, product descriptions, and details are fetched directly from the Shopify admin, removing the manual updating step required in their previous custom setup.
A box subscription involves multiple SKUs, so the migration was not straightforward. The Loop product specialist team created a migration plan tailored to Lilac St.'s setup, with reference to Loop's migration checklist and go-live checklist.
One challenge in the migration: the previous custom solution did not associate a unique ID with each new bundle order, processing all box subscriptions as regular subscriptions of multiple items.
In Loop Bundles, multiple line items are grouped under a single bundle ID. As part of the migration, the Loop team added a Bundle ID to all existing subscriptions, and configured all new incoming box subscriptions to create a new bundle transaction entry inside Loop and Shopify.
The migration also accounted for discount handling. In the previous setup, Lilac St. used manual Shopify discounts. The Loop team migrated these to Loop Bundle Discounts, with higher discounts configured as more items are added to the cart.
Once the migration was complete, the Loop team supported Lilac St. through go-live. The onboarding checklist included:
1. Cart changes: CSS adjustments, error messaging when required cart quantity is not met, and quantity handling on the cart to match the live site.
2. Bundles page styling: Worked with the Lilac St. team to align Bundles UI with the website's design language.
3. Customer portal setup: Loop's customer portal is customizable, so the team matched styling to the Lilac St. store and configured CSS to hide items the team chose not to surface to subscribers.
4. Testing: End-to-end testing of the setup before go-live
Within 11 months of implementing Loop's bundle setup, Lilac St. measured a 72.7% increase in subscription revenue and a 55.2% increase in total subscriptions activated.
Following the new UI going live, the team observed a 13% increase in conversion rate and total number of box orders processed.
Results reflect Lilac St.'s measured experience; outcomes vary by brand, vertical, product, and implementation.
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