Melissa Cameron
Melissa Cameron
Senior Product Designer
Subscription
Service
December 2025
Thortful was seeing 8% churn amongst its highest-value customers as increased competition and cost-of-living pressures changed how customers shopped. I led the end-to-end design of XTRAthortful, exploring how a loyalty proposition could give customers more reasons to return. From initial discovery to MVP launch, the project moved from idea to market in just four months.
Platform - Web & App
Metric - Retention
Impact
XTRAthortful has become a successful new proposition for the business, driving strong customer adoption and creating a new way to build loyalty and encourage repeat purchasing.
Monthly Subscribers to dateÂ
47K
Active customer increase
+25%
Revenue per customer
+ 28%
Design Overview
Full case study process
DISCOVERY
Customer Problems
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Customers want to shop online for convenience, but know they can get cheaper cards elsewhere e.g. supermarket.
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Customers are feeling the squeeze of prices rising everywhere (cost of living increases) and are seeking out savings/value where they can
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Customers don’t want to spend as much as £3.99 on certain recipients (colleagues/extended family). That price point is reserved for close friends and family only, which limits the number of cards they buy with us each year
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Customers want to be rewarded for buying with thortful
Problem definition
Historically, thortful had relied on promotional offers such as 4 cards for £10 to drive basket value. While successful, these promotions did very little to reward repeat customers throughout the year. Persistent themes from qualitative research showed customers mentioning that they weren't rewarded for being with thortful for a long time.Â
The data showed:​
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8% churn amongst our most valuable customers
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Increased competition from retailers offering loyalty schemes and subscriptions
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Growing customer sensitivity around price due to the cost of living
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A desire to increase customer lifetime value rather than relying purely on acquisition
Hypothesis: We believe introducing a loyalty proposition that offered clear, ongoing value would increase customer retention and repeat purchasing, measured by subscriber adoption, purchase frequency and revenue per customer.
Solution discovery
What does loyalty mean to customer doodles
Every successful loyalty programme begins with understanding what customers actually value.
Rather than assuming an annual subscription was the right answer, I wanted to understand what type of proposition customers would genuinely find worthwhile.
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I started by conducting competitor benchmarking across businesses both inside and outside the greetings card industry. Looking beyond direct competitors helped us understand broader customer expectations around subscription services, reward programmes and membership propositions. I reviewed organisations including Moonpig, Bloom & Wild, Papier, Card Factory and other subscription-led brands to understand how they communicated value, encouraged sign-ups and retained members over time.
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Research
Following the competitor benchmarking, I spoke with 20 customers across two distinct segments: top-tier lapsing customers and customers who had only placed 1–2 orders.
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I wanted to understand what each group valued rather than assume the same proposition would motivate everyone. While retaining our highest-value customers was the immediate challenge, designing solely for this group could limit the long-term growth of the proposition. XTRA also needed the potential to encourage lower-frequency customers to shop with thortful more often.
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Assumption: Different customer segments would be motivated by different benefits. A successful loyalty proposition therefore needed to balance retention of high-value customers with the opportunity to increase frequency amongst lower-engagement customers.
Key research insights:
Show me that I will actually save moneyÂ
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Insight: Customers struggle to justify paying upfront for a greeting-card membership unless the financial benefit is obvious.
Platform - Web & App
Don't make me work for my reward​
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Insight: Customers want rewards that are easy to access and automatically applied, without extra effort.
Give me something straight away​
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Insight: Customers want to experience immediate value from their membership, rather than waiting to see the benefits.
DEFINE
Defining the opportunity
Exploring four propositions
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Rather than jumping straight into an annual subscription model, I decided to take the insights from customers and explore 3 different propositions to pitch to the business.
Concept sketches
Tiered rewards
Customers would unlock increasingly valuable benefits as they shopped more, rewarding longer-term engagement with thortful. This is a similar pattern to Booking.com, the more they use the platform the more they unlock. This was a harder proposition for thortful, due to tight margins and the tiers needing to be vastly distinguishable to feel worth while.Â
Purchases would earn points that customers could exchange for discounts or free products, creating a clear relationship between shopping and reward. A very familiar pattern and offered by many companies such Costa Coffee, Marks & Spencer, Charlotte Tilbury and many others. This would therefore be easy for customers to understand and reduce cognitive load.
Points based loyaltyÂ
Annual subscription
Customers would pay once a year in return for immediate benefits, including cheaper cards and increased discounts. This is a similar modal to our closest competitor Moonpig, and Bloom and Wild. From a business standpoint it would mean more equitable cash, easy to understand proposition to the customer and help customers hopefully remain loyal to having spent cash up front.Â
Free Delivery
A simple loyalty proposition that rewards customers with free delivery on every card purchase, removing an additional cost at checkout. By offering immediate, tangible savings without complicated rewards or conditions, the concept aims to make repeat purchases more affordable, encourage customers to return more frequently and build long-term loyalty.
Design DeliveryÂ
Concept testing
These concepts then went back into user testing, I discussed with our customers the different offerings, showed them the high level drawings to get better confidence in which was the right decision was for us. There were several good choices for the thortful, and some aligned very closely to our competitors, however they would be worthless if our customers didn't feel like they were a good fit.Â
From all the concepts presented free delivery resonated most strongly with customers. Unlike points or tiered rewards, the value was immediate and required no additional effort customers could easily understand what they were getting and benefit from it every time they ordered. This gave us a clear direction: whatever loyalty model we pursued, the proposition needed to feel simple, tangible and valuable from the very first purchase.
Free Delivery
Direction Pivot
While free delivery was the strongest proposition in customer research, it was one input into a wider business decision. When I presented the findings to the board, the preference was to pursue a paid annual subscription model, aligning more closely with established competitor propositions and the wider commercial direction for XTRA. My role as Senior Product Designer was to clearly communicate the customer evidence and potential trade-offs, while recognising that the final decision also needed to account for business priorities beyond UX. From there, I adapted quickly, using what we’d learned about customers — particularly their need for clear, immediate and tangible value — to shape the chosen subscription model into an experience that could work for both the customer and the business.
Proposition framing
Create XTRAthortful, a simple annual subscription designed to give customers clear and immediate value from the moment they join. Members would receive a free card on sign-up, followed by 33% off individual cards and an exclusive 4 cards for £9 bundle offer.
Core experience mapping
Wireframing
Since this was a brand new feature on the website, I created a serious of wire frames for:
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Non Subscriber Flow
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Subscriber flowÂ
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Payment FlowsÂ
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Account management Flows.
The purpose of the wireframes was to ensure that we had considered all possible touch points to inform customers, that we didn't have conflicting messages/actions that would increase cognitive load, and essentially ensure that the main flow wasn't to disrupted whilst trying to call to the service as much as possible.
MVP Phase 1
Create XTRAthortful, a simple annual subscription designed to give customers clear and immediate value from the moment they join. Members would receive a free card on sign-up, followed by 33% off individual cards and an exclusive 4 cards for £9 bundle offer.
