How Boll & Branch Is Growing Consumer Loyalty With More Supply Chain Transparency
Luxury bedding brand Boll & Branch is bringing its supply chain transparency commitment to its website, as it finds consumer education translates to increased loyalty.
The company, which launched in 2014, manufactures and sells a range of bedding and home decor products on its direct-to-consumer site and branded stores, as well as through third-party retailers. Its new Origin Track platform is designed to let consumers trace their bedding “from seed to sheet” by entering the lot number from the product’s tag, with an overview provided for various production stages.
Although it’s not available for all products, in previewing Origin Track, co-founder and CEO Scott Tannen said on a panel at Shoptalk last month that information would extend back to the first product the company made 10 years ago.
He also noted that connecting shoppers with supply chain transparency was helping generate loyalty in a category not necessarily known for it, as well as changing the way Boll & Branch interacts with their customers.
“At the end of the day, you're taking a nondescript product and you're giving the customer a story to tell, and you're including them in the process,” he said. “As a company, we've invested millions of dollars into our factories, our farming communities, and found really meaningful ways to lift them up. But it's not us doing it — it’s ultimately the consumer doing it. So by connecting the customer to that, you breed a level of loyalty that's not really been seen in our category, and suddenly people start talking about it.”
Tannen expressed hope that providing consumers with a deeper look into their supply chain operations would push them to demand similar actions from other companies.
“We want to get into how products are made, but we've only ever really been allowing customers to come surface level. We're going to allow customers to go all the way through, and we hope that they're going to ask our competitors or other companies to do the same thing. Once you start exposing it — and hopefully you can make that level of transparency the standard — then you can start having real change.”
