ABOUT THE BRAND
Princess Polly slays Gen Z and Millennial trends
Bringing the latest everyday looks to trendsetters is a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Princess Polly is an Australian-born company that brings on-trend, quality fashion to the young Gen Z and Millennial masses.
Their obsession with making sustainable, low-impact clothing and their eye for trends has built them a cult following in Australia, the United States, and around the world.
“If you're on social media, whether that's TikTok or Instagram, you've probably seen Princess Polly. As a brand, we want to stay as ahead of the curve as possible, so an app was a big want for us to stay up to date with the tech that we're offering our customers.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
THE CHALLENGE
Building an experience for loyal fans
The Princess Polly team knows their customers’ vibes. As an e-commerce brand targeting young women, their mobile game had to be on point—but it wasn’t. Their mobile website was slow and not optimized, but they always knew they wanted to invest in their own mobile app. (After all, 93% of mobile consumers said they prefer to shop online using mobile shopping apps over the mobile browser.)
And with such a loyal fanbase, the team wanted to deliver an exclusive shopping experience to their best customers. Their top trending pieces sold out quickly, and they wanted a home base for fans to get first dibs on new products, access early product drops, and take advantage of premier deals.
Even though a mobile app was on their vision board, the Princess Polly team had a few reservations. They were concerned that a mobile app would be redundant next to their mobile website. Would customers even use it? Or would the team simply double their work efforts with no solid return on investment (ROI)? Valid questions aside, they knew they didn’t have the internal resources to take on a full app build by themselves.
““[An app is] a place for your cult following to get everything that they would need from your brand. I think an app is just more close to home. Your brand voice can be authentic with push notifications and there's a lot of customizations you can do within the app to cater to what your customers are looking for. Being able to have this type of sales channel is extremely valuable because a website can't do it the in the same way.”
Melanie Huang, UX E-Commerce Specialist
THE SOLUTION
Princess Polly customers vibe with their app
To keep up with competitors (who were launching apps of their own), Princess Polly CEO Wez Bryett knew they had to make a move. Once the team connected with Tapcart in 2019, they had a path forward to quickly launch a mobile app without building out an internal dev team.
The Princess Polly and Tapcart team partnered closely together to launch an app in the US in 2019 and another in their primary market Australia in 2020. Having an app for each market made it easier to personalize the app experience. Melanie thinks "that as much as you can optimize your website there still is that friction point of going to Chrome and typing in the website URL and then accessing your products from there". When it comes to the mobile app's UX, she "thinks that the app really helps with personalization and retention — and basically gives the customer a better shopping experience overall."
On launch, the team focused mostly on organic downloads and one-off exclusive app sales to drive downloads, and it’s grown tremendously with little effort. To date, the app is their second highest revenue-generating channel.
“It’s a very reliable sales channel for us. It tends to have a higher conversion rate and AOV than our mobile site because of speed and performance. We see that customers who end up in the app tend to stay there and that our loyal customers love it. It's a no-brainer to want to have something accessible on your customers’ phones at all times.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
THE RESULTS
Turning loyal customers into brand stans
For a team that moves fast and continuously has their fingers on the pulse of Gen Z trends, Tapcart was the perfect fit.
Using their Tapcart-built app, Princess Polly is turning casual customers into regulars and regular customers into brand fanatics. App users are much more likely to check in daily and weekly than customers who use the mobile and desktop website exclusively. Once the team gets them to the app, they stay there. That’s why the app has an astounding retention rate of 98.4%.
A big question for the team was how much additional work the app would be to maintain. Between maintaining the store, adding new content, and creating push notifications, it sounds like a lot of work—especially since they quickly saw a direct correlation between push notifications and revenue.
But with Shopify and Tapcart pairing seamlessly, and Tapcart’s drag-and-drop app capabilities, the workload has been minimal and well worth the effort. To save time but still pack a big punch, the Princess Polly team repurposes website and email content. That way, they’re not doubling their efforts—and it’s paying off.
Their current return on app spend is 414.3x. That means Princess Polly is earning roughly $400 in revenue directly in the app for every dollar they spend on the Tapcart plan each month. With their marketing dialed in, they control their revenue potential and see immense returns. Instead of spending more time and money retargeting existing customers through expensive SMS campaigns and ephemeral social media content, a better bang for their retention buck is to simply put more effort into driving customers to the app. For the right brands, a small investment in building an app can be a big lever to pull to see major results.
Now, Princess Polly’s most loyal customers have a place to go to stay on top of trends. The team continues to use push notifications to drive traffic, focusing on sharing the latest drops, app-exclusive sales, and early access to new products, leading to high conversions and strong retention rates.
The app is the perfect place for trendsetting influencers around the world.
“You get out of it what you put into it. So if you're promoting your customers to go to your app, if you do have reasons to get them there, they will get there. And given that we currently don't utilize the largest amount of app-specific marketing, I think that really speaks to the potential for having something that lives in a customer's phone and proves it's invaluable. I'm really excited to see that number increase as we do more app-specific marketing tactics this year.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
Want to learn more about how an app can drive session frequency, AOV, and overall retention?
Chat with our team of mobile experts and we’ll give you a quick walkthrough of the Tapcart platform.
ABOUT THE BRAND
Princess Polly slays Gen Z and Millennial trends
Bringing the latest everyday looks to trendsetters is a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Princess Polly is an Australian-born company that brings on-trend, quality fashion to the young Gen Z and Millennial masses.
Their obsession with making sustainable, low-impact clothing and their eye for trends has built them a cult following in Australia, the United States, and around the world.
“If you're on social media, whether that's TikTok or Instagram, you've probably seen Princess Polly. As a brand, we want to stay as ahead of the curve as possible, so an app was a big want for us to stay up to date with the tech that we're offering our customers.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
THE CHALLENGE
Building an experience for loyal fans
The Princess Polly team knows their customers’ vibes. As an e-commerce brand targeting young women, their mobile game had to be on point—but it wasn’t. Their mobile website was slow and not optimized, but they always knew they wanted to invest in their own mobile app. (After all, 93% of mobile consumers said they prefer to shop online using mobile shopping apps over the mobile browser.)
And with such a loyal fanbase, the team wanted to deliver an exclusive shopping experience to their best customers. Their top trending pieces sold out quickly, and they wanted a home base for fans to get first dibs on new products, access early product drops, and take advantage of premier deals.
Even though a mobile app was on their vision board, the Princess Polly team had a few reservations. They were concerned that a mobile app would be redundant next to their mobile website. Would customers even use it? Or would the team simply double their work efforts with no solid return on investment (ROI)? Valid questions aside, they knew they didn’t have the internal resources to take on a full app build by themselves.
““[An app is] a place for your cult following to get everything that they would need from your brand. I think an app is just more close to home. Your brand voice can be authentic with push notifications and there's a lot of customizations you can do within the app to cater to what your customers are looking for. Being able to have this type of sales channel is extremely valuable because a website can't do it the in the same way.”
Melanie Huang, UX E-Commerce Specialist
THE SOLUTION
Princess Polly customers vibe with their app
To keep up with competitors (who were launching apps of their own), Princess Polly CEO Wez Bryett knew they had to make a move. Once the team connected with Tapcart in 2019, they had a path forward to quickly launch a mobile app without building out an internal dev team.
The Princess Polly and Tapcart team partnered closely together to launch an app in the US in 2019 and another in their primary market Australia in 2020. Having an app for each market made it easier to personalize the app experience. Melanie thinks "that as much as you can optimize your website there still is that friction point of going to Chrome and typing in the website URL and then accessing your products from there". When it comes to the mobile app's UX, she "thinks that the app really helps with personalization and retention — and basically gives the customer a better shopping experience overall."
On launch, the team focused mostly on organic downloads and one-off exclusive app sales to drive downloads, and it’s grown tremendously with little effort. To date, the app is their second highest revenue-generating channel.
“It’s a very reliable sales channel for us. It tends to have a higher conversion rate and AOV than our mobile site because of speed and performance. We see that customers who end up in the app tend to stay there and that our loyal customers love it. It's a no-brainer to want to have something accessible on your customers’ phones at all times.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
THE RESULTS
Turning loyal customers into brand stans
For a team that moves fast and continuously has their fingers on the pulse of Gen Z trends, Tapcart was the perfect fit.
Using their Tapcart-built app, Princess Polly is turning casual customers into regulars and regular customers into brand fanatics. App users are much more likely to check in daily and weekly than customers who use the mobile and desktop website exclusively. Once the team gets them to the app, they stay there. That’s why the app has an astounding retention rate of 98.4%.
A big question for the team was how much additional work the app would be to maintain. Between maintaining the store, adding new content, and creating push notifications, it sounds like a lot of work—especially since they quickly saw a direct correlation between push notifications and revenue.
But with Shopify and Tapcart pairing seamlessly, and Tapcart’s drag-and-drop app capabilities, the workload has been minimal and well worth the effort. To save time but still pack a big punch, the Princess Polly team repurposes website and email content. That way, they’re not doubling their efforts—and it’s paying off.
Their current return on app spend is 414.3x. That means Princess Polly is earning roughly $400 in revenue directly in the app for every dollar they spend on the Tapcart plan each month. With their marketing dialed in, they control their revenue potential and see immense returns. Instead of spending more time and money retargeting existing customers through expensive SMS campaigns and ephemeral social media content, a better bang for their retention buck is to simply put more effort into driving customers to the app. For the right brands, a small investment in building an app can be a big lever to pull to see major results.
Now, Princess Polly’s most loyal customers have a place to go to stay on top of trends. The team continues to use push notifications to drive traffic, focusing on sharing the latest drops, app-exclusive sales, and early access to new products, leading to high conversions and strong retention rates.
The app is the perfect place for trendsetting influencers around the world.
“You get out of it what you put into it. So if you're promoting your customers to go to your app, if you do have reasons to get them there, they will get there. And given that we currently don't utilize the largest amount of app-specific marketing, I think that really speaks to the potential for having something that lives in a customer's phone and proves it's invaluable. I'm really excited to see that number increase as we do more app-specific marketing tactics this year.”
Claire Miller, E-Commerce Operations Specialist
Want to learn more about how an app can drive session frequency, AOV, and overall retention?
