Meet Muriel Vandersmissen, the founder of Flax & Stitch. Muriel has a head full of ideas and wishes that the day could last longer than 24 hours. As an eco-responsible, working mum, she wanted to create an easy to use, effective zero waste solution to limit her family’s use of plastic bags, aluminium foil and other disposable packaging.
So, in 2007, Flax & Stitch was born.
Flax, which means ‘lucky charm’ in Swedish, is the name of the Golden Retriever that Muriel had welcomed into her family just before launching her project (this also explains the paw print in the logo, added as a kind of lucky charm to each product). ‘Stitch’ was added to cover the textile, design and craft aspect of the brand.
“We’re a family owned business, based in Belgium” says Muriel.
“We want to help our customers reduce their usage of disposable items so focus on zero waste products such as PUL based reusable freezer bags (Flaxie Freeze shown below), sandwich bags and wraps. We also make reusable make-up and kitchen wipes,” she adds.
Flax & Stitch reaches their customer base via around 250 retail partners across Europe and through a webshop which has served customers from 27 different countries around the world. While the vast majority of online customers hail from Belgium, France and the Netherlands, Muriel admits ‘doing a little dance’ when they receive an order from a new country.
“Our motivation is not profit, but creating a sustainable business with balanced rewards for our customers, our retail partners, our suppliers and our company. Our goal is to have as many people as we can reach, enjoying our reusable products and thereby reducing their environmental impact”.
Flax & Stitch makes all of its products in Belgium (the only exception being dishcloths which are made elsewhere in the EU), partnering with local workshops employing people from a range of backgrounds and also with disabilities.
“We strive to reduce the waste generated by our operations. For example, we recently added a range of scrunchies to utilise the strips of fabrics left from the rolls used to make our bread bags.
“On Earth Day 2021, we became members of the 1% for the Planet, an organisation which brings together businesses across the world, from large companies (Patagonia, OXO) to small businesses like Flax & Stitch, all of whom commit to contributing 1% of their annual sales revenue to a variety of environmental projects around the world.”
Addressing the challenges
“We believe that the key challenge facing any small, relatively unknown business trying to sell online is establishing trust with their website visitors. If you cannot build that essential trust with a visitor, they won’t take the risk to become a customer. Providing recent, well presented and genuine product reviews is a huge step towards creating trust.
“The reviews we collect via HelpfulCrowd provide the ‘social proof’ that other, like minded people have purchased, received and appreciate our products generates trust and removes a key barrier to purchase.”
Why HelpfulCrowd?
Flax & Stitch decided to migrate their eShop from Weebly to Ecwid in 2019 and needed to find a replacement customer review tool.
“Our review collection process is now fully automated via HelpfulCrowd and we are thrilled to be achieving a higher response rate than through our previous provider. Fresh customer reviews are extremely important for a growing business like Flax & Stitch. Reviews help us to adjust our offering to better meet our customers’ requirements and, of course, they provide the critical social proof that helps visitors to trust our site and make their purchasing decisions.
Flax & Stitch have made good use of HelpfulCrowd’s range of website widgets to showcase reviews and ratings across their site. Being able to automatically share reviews to Facebook has also eased the workload of staff and increased the exposure and visibility of positive reviews online. Muriel has also been pleased with the support she has received from HelpfulCrowd.
“We have used the chat option to contact the responsive HelpfulCrowd support team on a number of occasions, not because of problems but to provide feedback or make suggestions about new features. The HelpfulCrowd team are always open to feedback and looking to improve. That’s what we love. In fact, some of our suggestions have even been used in their product developments.
“One of our USPs is that we offer a huge and changing range of different designs for each of our product categories. For example, over a hundred fabric designs for our sandwich wraps and the same for our bread bags. This means that we may not receive a review for a particular product variant or we may have received reviews but then that particular variant is permanently out of stock as we’ve used all the fabric for that design. The ability to create ‘Product Groups’ solves this issue by allowing us to group reviews as a product category level rather than per product variant. This feature was top of our requirements in a new review tool.”
Flax & Stitch has a relationship with HelpfulCrowd going back to June 2019. During their migration from Weebly to Ecwid, the business exported the 90 reviews they had collected on Weebly quickly and easily to HelpfulCrowd.
“The import process was straightforward and, very importantly, allowed us to preserve our review history. We currently have over 1,700 product reviews in HelpfulCrowd and our average monthly revenue has grown by around 300% since June 2019.”
Words of wisdom for other stores?
Muriel has the following four points of advice for other stores starting out or looking to expand their customer feedback and review strategy.
- The key purpose of any review app is to achieve a good return rate when sending out customer review requests. The review app should enable you to edit the text of the request email to reflect your brand’s personality, as well as product photos and offers. HelpfulCrowd provides this flexibility and we have achieved an overall response rate of 17%, usually with multiple product reviews per response.
- You should be able to present the reviews in keeping with your brand and website theme, as well as displaying them in other locations aside from just the product page itself. The variety of widgets and formatting options offered by HelpfulCrowd enable this goal.
- Reviews are incredibly valuable but it shouldn’t cost you a disproportionate amount financially. The tiered pricing plans offered by HelpfulCrowd combined with the high response rate strike a good balance.
- The demands of a growing business mean that time is always in short supply. Collecting, approving and sharing reviews should be as automated and frictionless as possible.
Final word
“Using HelpfulCrowd to collect customer reviews of our products in an effective and efficient manner has been a cornerstone of our strategy for building a successful on-line business. Generating trust was probably our key challenge and we are convinced that HelpfulCrowd has made a huge contribution to helping us to prevail.”
Click here for a free HelpfulCrowd demo.
Get social with Flax & Stitch
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