How Create grew their profit margins 8% per purchase with Fondue

“With Fondue, we win back profit on every first order to reinvest in acquiring more customers and growing the brand. That’s significant when you’re gaining thousands of customers a day, and it’s a cycle that keeps building over time.”  - Dan McCormick, Founder and CEO at Create

About

Create is the first modern creatine brand, busting health myths and reversing stigma with science. Creatine isn’t just for bodybuilders or serious athletes — it’s beneficial for almost anyone. With the world’s first creatine monohydrate gummy, Create is making taking the supplement delicious and convenient, too. 

Challenge

Coupon codes are an unsustainable way to acquire customers

Like many DTC brands, Create leveraged discount codes for customer acquisition. To capture emails, the brand offered an initial 15% off, plus multiple 15–25% discounts through their welcome flow. This strategy worked well when Create was just getting started. 

But CEO Dan McCormick realized that the faster their customer base grew, the more coupon codes hurt their bottom line. Discounts of less than $5 per order could add up to thousands in lost profits. Dan also feared the worst-case scenario: Shoppers getting accustomed to discounts and needing them to convert. 

So, he decided to rework Create’s discounting strategy from the ground up. Dan aimed to reclaim profitability from the very first order and reinvest those dollars into the brand. Money saved on discounts would become money to spend on getting more people in the funnel. 

“Before Fondue, we were automatically sending out 15–25% discounts — even to shoppers who would’ve otherwise purchased at full price.” 

Solution

Since CashBack is redeemed post-purchase, discounts go to shoppers who want them most

Dan had already seen CashBack offered by other ecommerce brands. When he interacted with these deals as a customer, he realized: 

“I'm the type of shopper who would never go out of their way to redeem a $5 gift card. I realized that meant other people, including Create customers, could behave in a similar way.” 

CashBack is redeemed post-purchase, which means every Create customer pays full-price at first. Down the line, shoppers with Dan’s mentality likely won’t claim their offers at all, while more price-sensitive shoppers will put in the effort to claim theirs. Those incremental savings also allow Create to offer higher-value deals in the future. 

Dan later discovered Fondue in action on a brand’s homepage — and felt this was the solution for Create’s customer acquisition margins he’d been waiting for. He liked that it was a fresh way to discount and felt it might appeal to shoppers who’ve gotten accustomed to 20% welcome discounts. 

To start, he introduced Fondue into Create’s welcome emails to see what value it could deliver. In a single day, the Fondue team onboarded Create and set up the brand’s new CashBack-based welcome flow.

To assess whether Fondue could deliver on its value proposition, Dan tested the CashBack offer against their former coupon codes.The CashBack model won, and Create has made Fondue their go-to discounting solution ever since. 

“We focused on our welcome flow to prove Fondue’s value proposition. Our tests were conclusive within the first couple of days, so we saw the value pretty soon after implementing Fondue.” 

Results

With Fondue, Create adds 7.9% profit margin to every order 

With Fondue, customer acquisition tactics like discounts no longer hurt margins. Instead, Create’s new, CashBack-centric welcome flow is more profitable than coupon codes, as 80% of shoppers ultimately convert without claiming discounts. 

• 7.9% profit added per purchase

Fondue has helped Create reinvent their discounting. Today, they’re equipped with more ways to incentivize shoppers — all while protecting profits and freeing up cash for future acquisitions. Moving forward, Dan plans to keep testing out CashBack at even more points in the customer journey. 

“Every time a customer decides to use CashBack, that’s higher profitability for us. Fondue frees up money that we can reinvest back into improving our products and acquiring new customers.” 

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