How Xena Workwear hit 87% Checkout+ adoption with zero complaints

The brand: built for women the industry never designed for

Xena Workwear makes safety footwear designed for women, built for the trades and industrial work where the standard option has always been a men's boot in a smaller size, not engineered for women, just resized. Based outside Detroit, the team sells direct to consumers and believes women are both strong and beautiful, and their work boots shouldn't ask them to choose.

They treat every detail of the buying experience as part of the product, including what happens when a customer needs to come back for something different.

The challenge: going free cost more than expected

Footwear lives and dies on fit. A customer who orders a size eight and needs an eight and a half is not a problem to be managed, they are a sale to be kept. The harder case is the customer who wants to move to a different style at a different price, what the industry calls a non-variant exchange. On Loop, Xena could handle both. When the team later moved to a free returns tool, that flexibility disappeared.

"If I want to go from one style to a completely different style and there's a price difference, that non-variant exchange, we couldn't do that with just Happy Returns. We just had to tell customers to get a gift card and then come back to the site. It was a horrible process."
- Dmitry Krivochenitser, COO at Xena Workwear

Free had a real cost. The shopper hits a dead end at the exact moment that decides whether they buy again, the moment a return either keeps their confidence or breaks it. That is what sent Xena looking for a returns partner again.

The decision: product over promise

With Happy Returns falling short, Xena opened a search for a new returns partner. One competitor, Redo, courted them hard. Dmitry said the pitch was polished and the sales process was impressive. But the closer he looked, the more the decision came down to locking in a scalable platform and a true partnership.

The economics were better for Xena's own shoppers. When comparing the two platforms, the cost carried by customers came out lower with Loop. For a brand where, as Dmitry puts it, every cent matters to their customers, that weighed heavily.

"With Loop, our team has had easier return processing and the ability to do non-variant exchanges. Instant exchanges have been a big hit for our customers."
- Dmitry Krivochenitser, COO at Xena Workwear

The returns experience also fits how footwear actually sells. Xena had been on Loop before and knew what good looked like: Instant Exchanges that let a shopper lock in a replacement on the spot, and the style-to-style swaps that had been a "horrible process" on the free tool they left.

Trust settled it. As Xena evaluated Redo, a reference check raised integrity concerns the team could not get past. It did not help that Redo had begun installing its checkout widget in Xena's store before any contract was signed, and that it proved hard to remove.

Ask Dmitry what he'd tell another brand weighing the same decision, and he’s honest about it:

“If another brand was currently evaluating returns vendors, I would tell them to run from Redo.”
Dmitry Krivochenitser, COO at Xena Workwear

Coming back to Loop: a bet on Checkout+ that paid off

Xena returned to Loop and turned on Checkout+, the feature the team had held off on in earlier evaluations. Return costs kept on increasing but the concern was always whether customers would resent sharing those costs with a small business like Xena.

"We were really worried that customers would find the new checkout process to be complicated. They didn't. The attach rate has been good and we haven't heard a single complaint.”
- Dmitry Krivochenitser, COO at Xena Workwear

Two months in, the numbers back him up. Nearly 9/10 of Xena's returns now run through Checkout+. The shared return costs have not impacted conversion.

The results: when the exchange works, the customer stays

For a footwear brand, the test of a returns experience is simple. When a shopper needs a different size or a different style, do they stay, or do they leave with their money?

Since coming back, nearly half of Xena's returns have turned into exchanges instead of refunds. More than 160 of those were the style-to-style swaps that used to dead-end on a gift card.

Almost 1/4 of returns now resolve instantly, the replacement locked in before hesitation can turn into a refund request. Together, that kept roughly $34,700 in revenue over the window that would otherwise have walked out as refunds.

That is the confidence the exchange is built to create. When swapping is easy, the shopper trusts the brand enough to stay with it instead of asking for their money back. Xena is holding a full review for the six-month mark, but the early signal is the one that matters: when the exchange works, the customer stays.

The bottom line: product integrity over sales tactics

Xena's experience taught them what they didn't want. A free tool that couldn't handle a style-to-style exchange left customers stuck at a gift card. A competitor with an aggressive pitch raised concerns they couldn't get past. One fell short on capability, the other on trust.

Returns are where a brand earns the right to a customer's next order. For a footwear brand, an exchange that just works, instantly and across styles, is what lets a shopper buy in the first place.

That's the confidence Xena wanted to give its customers, and the reason they came back to Loop.