Live Panel Recap: Creating a No-BS Customer Experience with The Perfect Jean
Emma Dinning
·July 23, 2025
Shoppers are a sophisticated bunch, and they’ve long since learned to see through marketers’ tricks. So if you’re laser focused on building campaigns to optimize sales numbers today, are you doing it at the expense of your brand’s long-term value?
On July 17, 2025, Jess Meher, Loop’s SVP of Marketing, sat down for a fireside chat with Ovadia Labaton, Co-Founder of The Perfect Jean, at Vervaunt Pulse NYC to discuss how the brand is doing away with BS sales tactics – and focusing instead on strategies that will help them create brand loyalty and trust, ensuring that they can build a business that lasts. Here are the key takeaways.
Customer-centricity is non-negotiable
For Labaton, it’s essential to focus on the customer’s perspective – prioritizing the importance of a seamless customer journey above the ROI of using conversion tactics.
A no BS-customer experience, he says, “means embracing things that are unmeasurable. What it means is basically putting yourself constantly in the customer's shoes and ignoring your P&L, ignoring metrics for a second, and just doing the right thing.”
For instance, he cites the example of prompting customers to exchange an item for a bonus credit, rather than offering a direct refund. Instead, he believes brands should make it as easy as possible for customers to complete desired actions without guiding them towards other options.
“The principle is very straightforward. You announce returns are free, exchanges are free, no BS, you'll not be charged... When you're buying something from us, we make sure that whatever you want to do, you are free to do without us nagging you with these little silly reminders. We want to make it as easy as possible for you.”
Meher also shared the story of how one Loop merchant exemplifies customer-centricity: “Their Founder/CEO places 15 orders a day on their own store and stress tests all complexities on logistics to track all the data across operations. They’re making sure every single micro experience adds up to something very positive.”
By prioritizing the customer experience in every interaction, you’ll be able to set your brand up for long-term, sustainable success.
Returns are a retention strategy, not a cost center
Expanding on this philosophy, Labaton looks at returns as another opportunity to extend the customer relationship, rather than a bottom-line cost.
“I see returns as one of the, if not the, largest profit centers in business."
Returns are a predictable expense: When building the business strategy for The Perfect Jean, the brand calculated all of their margins by factoring in a potential return rate of roughly 25%, which turned out to be accurate.
“But the reality is every single moment is an opportunity to make customers’ lives easier or make customers’ lives harder. That’s where delivering a seamless, hassle-free returns experience really pays off."
When evaluating competitors’ returns processes, he says, “I'm getting all these little patterns where they're trying to push me and force me to do something I don’t want to do. So you go down and map out all the things that you found that were a pain in the ass, and you start thinking about and fixing them and say, ‘When did I feel that little psychological tug that diverted me from my mission?’”
“A merchant might say, ‘Well, I got someone to exchange instead of return,’ but the customer is thinking, ‘Alright, they got me.’”
That experience is sure to put a sour taste in the customer’s mouth and discourage them from buying with the brand again. “I don’t want that,” says Labaton. “I want the customer to be happy. I want them to think that ‘If I want a pair of jeans, I will have the easiest, smoothest experience, and this brand respects me.’”
Don’t focus on short-term wins over long-term growth
For many marketing teams, conversion rate optimization is the name of the game. If you make this copy tweak or add that prompt during check-out, can you get a 3% or 5% lift?
But that’s not The Perfect Jean’s style. “We're actually unwinding a lot of those experiments in favor of just keeping it really simple,” says Labaton.
For instance, he and his team are looking at eliminating post-purchase upsell offers. “Why is that a good idea?” he asks. “I want to get the person to buy it, so any offer that we should be surfacing is pre-purchase.” That means focusing on providing customers with the best pricing option upfront, rather than playing games after checkout.
Post-purchase upsells represent “just one more moment where I'm like, ‘This is confusing. I thought I was done shopping. I want to get the product delivered. Just leave me the hell alone.’”
Avoiding such manipulative tactics represents another strategy for generating higher lifetime value.
“What converts short term is not necessarily what builds long term trust.”
Get inspired by Amazon’s approach
There’s a lot that ecommerce brands can learn from the biggest player in the space - Amazon.
Labaton says that The Perfect Jean saw an LTV increase of roughly 10% for every day faster they could deliver their products. “We’re making a profit by investing in a premium shipping experience, which generates sales that exceed the cost of that expense. We are very proud and comfortable to say that we’re modeling the business on the Amazon shipping and returns experience.”
He also cites Amazon and Nordstrom as large brands that have fantastic customer service, which growing brands can use as models.
“If you’re trying to build a 10 or 20 year brand, you need to focus on your customers. We’re measuring things in 5, 6, 7 year LTVs, and even our earliest cohorts are still buying. That’s a reflection of product quality, but it’s also a reflection that we’re doing our best not to piss off the customer.”
Your entire customer journey should be focused on helping the shopper do what they want to do – not distracting them from their mission. By building a seamless post-purchase journey, you’ll be able to generate brand trust and loyalty that will pay dividends over time.
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With Loop, your brand can offer everything from refunds to direct exchanges to shopper incentives and more. Even better? These exchanges build your business.