How Athena Club recovered 73% more revenue with Butter

Opportunity

Solving involuntary churn to drive sustainable growth

Since launching in 2017, Athena Club has experienced a meteoric rise, thanks to the brand’s popular personal care product subscriptions, including saving kits, lotions, and face washes.

What set the New York-based brand apart from competitors was their dedication to combining thoughtful product design with operational excellence. While many brands focus solely on the front-end experience, Athena Club ensured that every touchpoint—from product formulation to checkout—was seamless and efficient. This included a laser focus on optimizing their entire payments stack to drive efficiency, ensuring a smooth and reliable transaction process for customers.

In 2023, Athena Club decided to further enhance their payments stream by resolving a persistent issue—passive churn. Also known as involuntary churn, passive churn occurs when a subscriber’s recurring order is canceled, even though they’d still like to receive the product or service. 

“We think a lot about passive churn because subscriptions are our business,” said Emily von Borstel, Athena Club’s customer experience manager. “For a long time, passive churn made up a significant amount of our overall churn. We were worried because we had worked hard to earn those customers and wanted to keep them in your ecosystem.”

Testing a bare-bones retry solution

Acting quickly, Athena Club implemented a legacy retry solution. Although the brand saw some success, the tool didn’t perform as well as Athena Club had desired. 

Alexander Sokolov, senior director of software engineering at Athena Club, spearheaded the company’s campaign to reduce passive churn. “Our initial retry solutions used a rudimentary approach, and we knew right away that it wasn’t right for us,” he recalled.

Athena Club’s initial solution relied on brute force to recover failed payments. Called “woodpeckering,” this approach ignores the reason a payment failed and instead repeatedly retries the transaction until it is successful. For Athena Club, this meant six retries every six days.

“Retrying six times every six days was okay, but not great,” Alexander said. “It was mostly just random luck when a payment went through.”

Athena Club knew they needed a new, nuanced solution to achieve their goals, but faced a crucial challenge. The personal care brand’s development resources were limited. The solution was partnering with a sophisticated payments optimization platform that offered a turnkey integration with the brand’s payment service provider.

Solution

Turnkey payments optimization powers success

After a thorough search, Athena Club tapped Butter to solve the company’s passive churn challenge. Three clear benefits stood out to the brand.

Turnkey integration with Recharge

Butter integrates with leading payment processors and subscription management platforms, including Recharge, Braintree, and Stripe. Athena Club launched with Butter in one month, significantly faster than other payment solutions. 

“The less work we had to do, the more likely it was we were going to adopt a solution,” Alexander said about the brand’s search for a payment optimization platform. 

Advanced AI and machine learning capabilities

A low-lift, lightning-fast integration wasn’t the only reason Athena Club tapped Butter. 

Unlike other solutions, Butter utilizes machine learning to analyze hundreds of data points associated with each transaction and uses this information to determine the most effective retry strategy for each payment category.

Among the many data points Butter analyzes is the date and time when transactions are charged. In Athena Club’s case, Butter was able to determine the optimal date and time to retry transactions caused by insufficient funds, resulting in a 16% relative increase in recovered invoices for this decline category.

“Butter’s AI and self-optimization were really key,” Alexander said. “It’s important to have a solution that understands your use case and your data, and improves over time—which was something the other solutions weren’t doing.”

During Athena Club’s search, Alexander said he learned that other solutions claimed to utilize AI, but couldn’t back up the claim.

“Nowadays, a lot of businesses say they use AI, but when you press them, it becomes obvious they’re just using it as a buzzword,” he said. “The fact that Butter actually uses AI and can easily explain how they use it to reduce failed payments sets them apart.”

Payments and subscription expertise

In addition to a quick launch and a nuanced approach to recovery, Athena Club required that their retry solution be staffed by team members with deep expertise. 

Butter’s team has a wealth of knowledge in subscriptions and payments. Many team members have developed in-house payment solutions before transitioning to Butter to build payment technology at scale. In fact, 82% of Butter employees are technical, and 35% are machine-learning engineers or data scientists. With decades of combined experience, Butter’s team can quickly run tests and develop strategies. 

Butter team members’ expertise also encompasses complex topics, such as card decline codes. 

There are two decline code categories, soft and hard. Soft decline codes (incorrect address, wrong PIN, etc.) are considered safe to retry, while hard decline codes (expired card, wrong card number, etc.) are typically not safe to retry. 

Butter’s team worked with Athena Club to implement a retry strategy that included soft declines and hard declines that were actually recoverable.

Results

Athena Club sees a 73% increase in recovered revenue with Recover by Butter

After 12 months with Butter, Athena Club saw these results: 

• 73% relative increase in revenue recovery
• 78% relative increase in invoice recovery rate
• 22% decrease in involuntary churn

“The results speak for themselves, and they were self-evident from the get-go,” Alexander said.

Beyond payment recovery

Minimizing disputes and chargebacks

Butter takes a consultative, customer-centric approach to partnering with merchants, analyzing data throughout their payments system to flag opportunities for improvement. Butter’s suite of payments products includes Dispute by Butter.

The product automatically intercepts and resolves disputes, reducing processing fees, dispute count, and manual tasks. By implementing Dispute by Butter, Athena Club significantly reduced the workload of the brand’s customer service team. After only 2 months, Butter reduced Athena Club’s disputes by 81%.

“When we started using Butter's dispute tool, we had just started addressing disputes, so allowing Butter to take over the process enabled us to continue focusing on our more essential functions, like processing and sharing feedback and creating really outstanding experiences for our customers,” said Emily, whose team handles disputes for Athena Club.