Rockets of Awesome: Reducing Operations Cost, Gaining Flexibility and Staying Awesome

Rockets of Awesome started with the goal of making shopping for your kids fun and easy. It had a fully custom website that used an algorithm to curate quarterly boxes based on your kid’s style, size and preferences. It’s a fun, loud and playful brand that has a strong subscription base but also sells clothing outside of subscription. 

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In 2022, The Hedgehog Company acquired Rockets of Awesome and set off to simplify operations and make it easier for the brand to experiment and grow. As part of this, they transitioned the site to a combination of Shopify and Awtomic to streamline operations, increase flexibility but still keep the brand’s unique experience and flair.  

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The Challenge: A high price for flexibility

When Hedgehog acquired Rockets of Awesome, they noticed there were a few things holding the brand back from growth and profitability. 

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A lack of ability to experiment: Since the website was fully custom, every little thing that the team wanted to try had to be custom developed. Experimenting with discounts, promotions, merchandising and even site banners took development time and complexity. 

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As Paige Connell (Head of Operations at The Hedgehog Company) explained it: “Something as simple as our team being able to make a discount code to put on a flier in packages for eCommerce customers looking to convert them to subscription - we just couldn’t do things like that before.” 

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No flexibility for the team and customers: Stocking and managing inventory for different styles, sizes and seasons is difficult, but it’s especially difficult with high volume, quarterly subscription sales where making adjustments is painful and time intensive. As Paige described it: “Our team wasn’t easily able to toggle on or off different products and manage what was offered in boxes based on available inventory.’

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Beyond that, customers had no flexibility or control over the contents of their boxes and often requested one-off changes, which led to high and variable support needs. 

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Big peaks and valleys of customer support needs: As the volume of subscriptions grew, so did the need for support as customer request volume peaked at a point each quarter and then died off, this resulted in the need for quarterly scaling up and down of the support team, which was expensive in both time and cost. Each one-off customer request required a lot of manual work for the team, so it was hard to see how the business could scale without exacerbating the problem. 

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The Solution: A Unique Subscription Experience, Powered by Awtomic 

The Hedgehog team wanted to keep the unique experience of getting a quarterly, curated box that the Rockets of Awesome subscription customers loved, but move to a platform that would allow them more control and flexibility. They found the perfect solution matching an in-house curation engine with Awtomic’s powerful subscription and build-a-box functionality. 

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A more flexible experience, maintaining the unique flair: Using Awtomic’s subscription platform and build-a-boxes, the Rockets of Awesome team is now able to offer more flexibility to customers and their own team. They focus internal engineering resources on the work that makes Rockets unique - the quiz and curation engine and let the platform take care of the rest. 

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Customers can now jump in and curate their boxes and even pull up their order dates to get their items sooner. “If they like their curation, that's fantastic, but knowing that they're able to take advantage of editing their box - that alone gives people the freedom to do what they need. They used to not be able to change sizes, which is super important for this business model because their kids are always changing sizes. So they can even experiment with ordering, pants in one size and shirts and another size. They could not do that historically.” Paige explained. 

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The operations and marketing teams can now also easily make the adjustments they need to make to keep things running smoothly - editing the box contents on the fly as items go out of stock, managing inventory and running promotions.

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Huge savings on customer support cost and time: Now that it’s so easy to manage boxes for customers, not only is there a reduction in customer support volume, but there isn’t a need to scale up the support team quarterly. The Rockets of Awesome team estimates a ⅔ reduction in Customer Support time and over 50% reduction in overall operational costs. 

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“We're not spending the time and dollars on facilitating customer requests that were almost always - ‘Can you edit my box?’ ‘Can you change my size’ etc. So that has been, not only a cost savings but a time savings for us - which, at the end of the day, when you're operating multiple brands - is huge.”  

• Paige Connell (Head of Operations - The Hedgehog Company)

Rockets of Awesome Results with Awtomic

• ⅔ Reduction in Customer Support time 
• 50% Reduction in Overall Operational Costs

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“We feel very supported by Awtomic and are excited by the opportunities that are ahead, especially setting up Awtomic Moments. We have a customer who, once they subscribe, they usually stick around for a while. It's really important for us to make sure the experience is reliable and keep it exciting for them to be a subscriber.” 

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If you're interested in experiencing the power of Awtomic firsthand and discovering how it can revolutionize your subscription and repeat purchase experience, book a demo with us here.

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Our team will provide a comprehensive overview of Awtomic’s capabilities, demonstrating how it can provide branded, delightful subscription experiences for your customers, maximize LTV and retention, and keep operations and customer service streamlined and simple for your team.