7 years of cooperation recap
TRUST IN BUSINESS – STARTING POINT OR A STEP ALONG THE WAY?
BlueGrid
BlueGrid.io brought together experts from different areas within the Information Technology industry. Using our cumulative experience we’ve created a framework helping companies expand their teams by sourcing the right talent and sustainably growing them. This allows our partners to focus on what matters – business growth – while knowing they have a strong talent partner to back them up.
Client – Recharge
Since 2014, Recharge has helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription businesses. Recharge powers billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers, its team counting over 230 team members across 10 countries.
What separated Recharge from other E-Commerce platforms was the amount of customizability. Recharge followed the principles of the industry leaders and decided to open its API for public use. This has equipped Recharge’s clients to be able to transform the entire E-Commerce market that we know today with inventive integrations.
During its rapid growth, the Recharge team needed to build, train, and scale a performant Support team quickly. Strong customer success and a positive user experience have always been the cornerstones of Recharge’s business policy. Being part of the first-line responders, the Customer Success team had to reflect these values.
BlueGrid’s previous experience with building dedicated Support teams helped bridge this gap quicker than anticipated. The initial focus was sourcing quality candidates that embody integrity, quality, and quick decision-making. Through continual training, this first class of Customer success agents set the foundation and quality standard for the team’s later growth.
Recharge’s Growth Milestones, Goals and Results:
- 2018. With a product now used by millions of consumers every month, Recharge focused on improving the customer experience with new features like Apple Pay and a Theme Engine. They also began aggressively hiring the best talent we could find to join our mission.
- 2019. They invested in engineering infrastructure and people. Recharge launched its Analytics product and landed its biggest merchant to date. The platform has become widely recognized as the market leader.
- 2020. Their collective experience as a company has prepared them for the dynamic world around us. With the right tools, teams, and processes in place, Recharge is well-positioned to enable its customers and employees to thrive.
- 2021. Recharge raised $277 million in growth capital, reaching a valuation of $2.1 billion.
- 2022. Recharge is serving 15,000 merchants with more than 20 million subscribers globally.
- 2023. Recharge continues to grow within the Beauty and Personal Care industries with a 15% year-over-year growth rate.
BlueGrid for the Recharge – Summary
2018. was a year when Recharge shook the market by launching the Theme Engine Customer Portal. The legacy customer portal wasn’t easy to modify. Things had to be done through blind code-injecting, there was no source code access and documentation was scarce, making it tough for developers to work with.
It was the year the Theme Engine was launched. In short, the Theme Engine helped customers refine their shop’s theme through a simple yet intuitive interface. This opened up new conversation opportunities, adding flexibility where there were none. Since this feature is mostly aimed at developers, it was paramount to bring the documentation up to speed. And that’s where the Theme Engine team with BlueGrid came to shine.
Theme Engine support played a key role in documenting the new customer portal. Same as with API support, customer support was provided through email and public slack channels, making Recharge very favorable amongst customers and allowing them to create a community with 500+ merchants and agencies.
2019. This is where we continued our growth together. The teams staffed at BlueGrid.io continued to provide (consistently) excellent results which served as a basis for the team’s expansion. We’ve started bringing in more people and adding new members to the Customer Success, API Support, Theme Engine, and Developer teams. With this continual growth new career paths opened and the team became more ingrained into Recharge’s Business fabric.
We have created a team of 3 theme engine support engineers, and 2 API support engineers and expanded our scope of work by hiring 1 storefront developer. The Recharge team at BlueGrid manually migrated 60+ production stores to Version 2 which allowed the company to stop supporting Version 1 and focus only on the Version 2 customer portal.
2020. Shopify Connector project, which was the most impactful and valuable project for the team. It was a big cross-department project for both us and the company because of a complete redesign flow with the parent platform which was the core of our platform. It resulted in meeting all the criteria the parent platform required.
This work allowed our client to continue operations without any idling and was the most critical project due to parent platforms-strict requirements that paralyzed every integration to use their checkout. It was a big race between competitors, and whoever built the reliable integration could start selling their services again.
2021. A new API was launched and BlueGrid and Recharge team worked together on setting up the Developer Hub, which made it easier for developers to build custom solutions on top of the Recharge Platform. This allowed for greater flexibility without compromising stability.
At the same time, a partnership with BigCommerce was launched and BlueGrid developers were some of the key team members in expanding the integration options across this new eCommerce platform.
2022. We’ve worked closely with Rechage in launching the Flows Automation Tool. Flows helped merchants test and iterate on subscriptions, loyalty, and bundling strategies, providing personalized experiences to customers. It allowed merchants to run A/B tests and optimize customer engagement efficiently.
2023/2024:
In 2023, we started working with Recharge on a new – Conversion project.
Scenario: Shopify has introduced an improved process for subscriptions, and Recharge needs to create a seamless integration of their merchants’ accounts with the Shopify checkout tool.
Recharge supports thousands of merchants, and we are helping them transition smoothly to the new system.
Mission: Our main goal is to make sure all merchants are successfully migrated to Shopify’s checkout by the end of November 2024.
This project will be described in a separate case study.
Conclusion
These 7 years long cooperation allowed our client to continue operations without any idling. It was a big race between competitors, and whoever built the reliable integration could start selling their services again.
Currently, we have 35 people divided into 6 teams servicing Recharge:
API Team
Theme Engine Team
Product Team
Internal Tool Development Team
Technical Support team
Special projects team
This cooperation resulted in making the net-new customer portal type and Recharge managed to retain their clients by offering them a completely new customer portal experience that is more user friendly, modern and optimized. In short, it saved a lot of money and managed to earn more. It opened a huge door for the cross-platform initiative that the company was heading and introduced hosted and embedded variations.
This team is growing rapidly, the same as the goals we are achieving together. Understanding why trust is important in every form of business, helps you stay true to the course no matter what obstacles are thrown in the way.
