How Jack Archer Doubled Customer Retention

When men’s lifestyle brand Jack Archer set out to scale, it faced many of the same challenges Shopify brand owners everywhere contend with: high customer acquisition costs, limited resources for customer support, and an urgent need to boost repeat purchases. Today, Jack Archer stands out for doubling its customer retention rate, all thanks to a proactive approach to customer support.

Here’s how they did it — and how you can do the same with OpenDesk.

Jack Archer: From small business to 10x revenue

Jack Archer is a men’s apparel brand best known for its high-quality everyday wear, offering products that strike the perfect balance between style and comfort. After being acquired by OpenStore, the brand’s revenue skyrocketed by 10x — from an already impressive $1 million to $10 million in just nine months. Not only did the brand see immediate growth in sales, but behind the scenes, it underwent a major transformation in how it handled customer support.

One of the key pillars of that success? Dramatically improving the customer experience to strengthen retention.

Scaling brands face many of the same common challenges

Many growing brands pour their resources into ads and marketing campaigns — but once they get new customers in the door, they face a new challenge: retaining them. It’s a common story for many Shopify business owners. Acquisition is pricey, so how do you keep customers coming back?

When it comes to customer retention, many scaling brands experience common challenges, such as:

Disjointed support channels

As brands gain traction, they often see more inbound messages flooding in — from Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, and other channels. Without a centralized place to categorize and address these concerns, important issues risk being overlooked. Customers, frustrated by slow or inconsistent replies, become less likely to make repeat purchases.

Low repeat purchase rates

No matter how appealing a product is, a negative customer support experience can kill a customer’s desire to shop again. This is a daunting reality for many businesses as they work to scale and build brand loyalty.

Fulfillment and operational inefficiencies

Meanwhile, fulfillment errors and other operational slip-ups — like products that don't match their descriptions or shipping delays — can result in avoidable support tickets and unhappy customers. To scale effectively, growing brands must tackle these recurring issues head-on — but first, they need to identify their most pressing problems.

Jack Archer's turning point: Proactive support and smart categorization

When OpenStore brought Jack Archer into its portfolio, one of the first tasks was to shift from a reactive approach to customer support — fielding complaints as they piled up — to a proactive one. Jack Archer started systematically categorizing every customer message based on specific tags, such as:

• Issues to solve: Anything broken or incorrect, like wrong sizes or shipping problems
• Inquiries: Straightforward questions about products or policies
• Actions to take: Requests that might require intervention, like exchanges or refunds
• Comments: General feedback that might not need a response but could provide valuable insights

This tagging system made it easier to identify trends and eliminate the root causes of customer problems. More importantly, Jack Archer could start extracting data from customer feedback — for example, the number of tickets per order, the number of issues per order, and how those figures changed from week to week. A sharp increase in issues per order from one week to the next could indicate an urgent problem that needed to be addressed immediately. This data helped Jack Archer get ahead of problems and prevent customers from churning.

You can see how valuable this type of system can be. There's just one problem. For most ecommerce brands, categorizing support tickets can be a real hassle. If you’re currently relying on Gmail and juggling messages across social media platforms, the process will likely look something like this:

1. Export all your customer inquiries into a spreadsheet
2. Tag each message manually in issue categories that you define
3. Pull your Shopify order data and match it to your support tickets
4. Calculate how often each issue arises, week over week, as a percentage of total orders

While this approach can work, it’s incredibly time-consuming and prone to error. You’d need to do these exports regularly, maintain consistency in tagging, and keep your data organized to yield real insights.

Another option: AI-powered ticket categorization with OpenDesk

Behind the scenes, the OpenStore team was building a tool to automate the process that helped drive Jack Archer's success. This prototype would eventually become OpenDesk, the only customer support tool that uses AI to categorize tickets automatically.

Here's how it works:

• AI-powered ticket categorization: Instead of manually tagging support inquiries, OpenDesk uses AI to parse the text and classify the issue type. Track tickets per order by topic to pinpoint root causes that lead to unhappy customers.
• Real-time data: Keep a pulse on the metrics that matter to improve customer retention.
• Centralized insights: All channels — Gmail, Instagram, and Facebook — flow into one dashboard. This holistic view reveals common issues faster, making it easier to share actionable insights with your fulfillment or product teams.
• Proactive support: Because OpenDesk flags issues in real-time, you can reach out to customers before they leave a negative review with personalized messages or a quick resolution that salvages the relationship and increases retention.

Using these principles, Jack Archer tackled issues before they snowballed. Rapid ticket resolution meant customers felt heard and taken care of, and the team saw the highest-frequency issues and fixed them at the source, meaning fewer repeat mistakes like incorrect size charts or shipping errors.

Most notably, Jack Archer’s customer retention rate doubled. They also enjoyed that 10x boost in revenue, thanks, in part, to eliminating inefficiencies and making customers far likelier to repurchase.

Apply Jack Archer's playbook with OpenDesk

Now that OpenDesk has evolved into a fully-fledged customer support platform, any Shopify brand can replicate Jack Archer's success. Here’s how:

1. Eliminate manual tagging. Free your team from spreadsheets. OpenDesk’s AI assigns tags based on the most common issues facing DTC brands.
2. Unify your support channels. Seamlessly connect Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, and more to centralize inbound messages and ensure you never miss a complaint or inquiry.
3. Leverage built-in data and analytics. Easily track which issues recur most frequently, fix them, and see how your metrics shift week-over-week relative to orders.
4. Proactively respond to customers. Auto-draft responses and personalize them based on customer data.

Jack Archer’s story highlights just how powerful proactive customer support and smart issue categorization can be. By implementing a streamlined customer support system with robust data and AI-driven tagging, Jack Archer solved operational headaches, preempted negative reviews, and doubled its customer retention.

The best part? You don’t need to invest in building a custom tool or waste countless hours in spreadsheets. OpenDesk brings these powerful capabilities right to your Shopify business.

Start a free OpenDesk trial today and be among the first to transform your customer support from a hectic chore to a powerful growth engine.