Early Access is The New Hype Product Strategy
How Rewarding Top Customers Became a Cross-Channel Retention Tactic
Since Supreme’s inception, every Thursday at 11:00am ET, millions of style savvy customers nervously refresh the brand’s website in hopes of securing the latest blockbuster release. No matter who you were or how much you spent with the brand, you still had to wait for 11:00am ET to shop. Supreme was the mastermind behind ‘drop culture,’ the timed released of limited merchandise that creates weekly anticipation and an instant hit of dopamine when you checkout before the item inevitably sells out in just a few seconds. Luxury and mass-market brands successfully adopted this tactic throughout the years and its been a key product strategy for the fashion community. Due to shifting consumer taste and the general economic climate, weekly drops aren’t enough to excite and retain customers so brands are looking for new ways to reward top consumers and keep them engrained in the ecosystem. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of early access where brands grant certain consumers the opportunity to shop their coveted upcoming releases up to 24 hours in advance, making it easier to secure highly desired limited items. Early access is the future of customer retention and cultivating community.
Ronnie Fieg, founder of KITH, has a prolific lineage of collaborations with Asics and New Balance. As new KITH iterations and collaborations release, the team grants early access to consumers that have previously bought a pair of his collaborations from that line (i.e. to be eligible to buy a new Asics collaboration early, you must have purchased a previous KITH x Asics collaboration). KITH is known for rewarding its early consumers and fostering a sense of community through honoring early adopters of the brand. This is a very explicit criteria to gain early access. For many other brands, criteria to unlocking early access is strategically more arbitrary. It could be based on how much you’ve spent per season or what your earliest purchase was. Keeping the criteria for early access eligibility purposefully vague fosters increased retention and increases the probability of purchase.
Aime Leon Dore is an excellent example of a tiered early access approach whose eligibility criteria has a lot of speculation. Historically, there were two tiers of early access - a limited VIP/F&F level which granted access typically at 8am ET and a more general early access which granted access at 11am ET, both 24 hours prior to the general release. Little is known about how to gain or retain access or how many people comprise each tier. Occasionally, by the time general early access gets their access at 11am ET, some items are already sold out, making it virtually impossible for the non-early access consumers to buy the items. This ensures that the most exclusive and limited items go to the biggest fans of the brand and continues to foster a culture of ‘if you know, you know’ around certain items.
For many brands, early access is a strong lower funnel tactic to diversify channel-strategy. Brands like Every Other Thursday and AndAfterThat, which are largely creator-lead with strong creative assets and a large following on social platforms, offer early access if you become an email subscriber. Every Other Thursday’s green cardholder went viral on TikTok in parallel path with the resurgence of the old-money aesthetic trend. For your best chance at securing one of the limited iconic cardholders, signing up as an email subscriber is your best bet. The strategy is to develop strong upper funnel viral content on TikTok or Instagram and move that demographic to email as they go further down the purchasing funnel.
App downloads and adoption is another strong cross-channel tactic that can benefit from the early access strategy. Some brands offer in-app exclusive releases or reserve stock solely for consumers that have the app. As KITH revamped its app earlier last year, to increase the number of app downloads, they started to grant early access to shop their newest collections if you shop on the app. Early access is a powerful tool to drive cross-channel awareness, complete a full-funnel marketing experience, and foster retention among the consumers at the end of the bell curve.
