Why Reale Actives Chose Loop for One of 2026's Biggest Launches

When Alix Earle launched Reale Actives, every detail was planned. The returns platform included.

When Alix Earle launched Reale Actives in March 2026, her skincare line for acne-prone skin sold out in under 10 hours. Revenue crossed $5 million with no paid advertising, one of the biggest DTC beauty launches of the year.

The sellout looked like a viral moment. It was really the payoff of a carefully built brand. Reale Actives was created with Imaginary Ventures, the consumer firm founded by Net-a-Porter's Natalie Massenet, and is led by a CEO who came up through Kiehl's and The Body Shop. Every layer of the tech stack was a decision and that included returns.

The person who made the returns platform call was Michael Bair, Reale Active’s Fractional Head of CX. Reale runs its returns on Loop, on top of Shopify Plus. Bair had built on Loop before, and he'd made this same platform decision many times for other brands.

That's what makes his choice worth paying attention to. Evaluating returns platforms is part of his job. Before consulting, he spent four and a half years as SVP of Customer Experience at FIGS, where he first ran Loop at scale across a large, variant-heavy apparel catalog. That environment was demanding for returns: a huge range of styles, sizes, colors, and variants, where a customer's ability to make an exchange, especially an indirect one from a product to something different, often decided whether they came back. The part that stayed with him was the team behind the software, and the timely, complete answers he got when it mattered.

So for Reale Actives, Bair didn't need to experiment.

For proven technology like returns, buy what already works

If Bair has an evaluation philosophy, it's a simple one: returns and post-purchase software is mature, well-understood technology, so you choose it based on what it does today, not on a headline or a promise.

Pricing is a good example. A platform that looks free is usually funded by your customers, through the coverage they opt into at checkout. That model isn't unique to any one vendor, so "free" was never the real question for him. The real question is whether you understand how it's funded, and how much your customers are actually covering.

He brings the same discipline to customization. Returns software is an established category, so he doesn't put much weight on a vendor's promise to build something bespoke. Known technology should already do what you need. What matters is proven functionality you can watch working now, not a roadmap you take on faith.

It helps that Loop has done one thing longer than almost anyone. It started as a returns platform and never drifted from it, which is why the core experience feels solved rather than assembled.

For Bair, he was looking for a long-term partner that can scale with his business. "When you're evaluating Loop and Redo, the pricing will be similar and the features will be similar. So the real question is: which one do you trust as a long-term partner? For us, that answer was Loop."

Self-serve returns and reason data you can trust, from day one

The trust shows up in the day-to-day, too. Reale's customers handle returns on their own, which keeps the work off a lean team. And every return comes back tagged with a reason clean enough to act on, because the flow is clear enough that customers aren't clicking through at random just to finish.

Clear return reasons generated from a low-effort experience are one of the most valuable things returns can produce.

The choice was really about trust already earned

For Reale Actives, the decision was less about weighing options and more about trust Bair had already built: four and a half years of getting returns right together, a team he'd come to rely on, and a product that held up through all of it. When you're launching a brand this visible, you reach for the partner you already know delivers.

A returns partner you can trust.

If you're weighing your options, we'd love to show you how Loop earns it.

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