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The play from day one was cross-selling through loyalty. If someone's buying a bunch of Energy and Focus gum, we want to get Calm and Clarity or Sleep and Recharge into their hands. Points make that happen without us having to discount anything.
Functional gum, one-time buyers
Neuro makes functional gum and mints. Energy, focus, calm, sleep. Two guys started it in a dorm room at UC San Diego, turned down a million dollars on Shark Tank, and built it into a $100M+ business. You can find their gum in 20,000 stores, all over TikTok Shop, Amazon, and their own site.
Neuro is great at getting people to try the gum. The issue? Most of them purchase once and vanish. Someone grabs a pack off a CVS shelf or impulse-buys on TikTok, and Neuro never sees them again. Retention was sitting at 30%, and the team wanted it north of 50%.
The bigger picture: every purchase that happens on Amazon or TikTok or at a retail register is a customer Neuro doesn't own. No email. No purchase history. No relationship. They needed a way to pull those people into their own world and give them a reason to keep coming back through neurogum.com. They signed with Rivo in October 2024 and got moving fast.
A first attempt that fell flat
The first version of the loyalty program didn't land. The reward structure was confusing (some multiplier math nobody wanted to do), the creative felt off-brand, making it difficult for the team to promote it cross-channel. Brinna D., Neuro's loyalty and retention lead, took a step back to reevaluate how loyalty needed to show up for Neuro.
If your own team isn't excited about the program, your customers won't be either. That was the signal they needed to rebuild. Brinna spent two months on it, presented the strategy to every department: email, paid, social, retail, partnerships, CRM. The program relaunched on February 3, 2026 under the name "Neuro Rewards."
Receipt scanning was something I was excited about from the start. We have 20,000 retail doors. If someone buys our gum at Whole Foods and we can still bring them into our loyalty ecosystem, that changes the whole equation for us.
Dead simple rewards, free product as the hook
After analyzing top-tier loyalty programs, the clear path forward was simplicity. The old reward system gave you some fractional dollar amount per 50 points. Nobody understood it. Brinna swapped it for clean tiers: 250 points gets you $5 off, 500 gets you $10, and so on up to $25.
"We wanted it to be dead simple. You look at your points balance, you know exactly what you can get. $5, $10, $15. No calculator required. That alone made it feel more like a game people wanted to play."
Then she added free product rewards alongside the discounts. This is the move that changed everything.
Spending budget on branded merch when the concept hadn't been proven wasn't an option, so Brinna used products Neuro already sells: a peppermint blister pack for 250 points, a limited-edition PADI x Neuro Whale Shark Tin for 300 points, a full-size Energy & Focus gum for 1,250 points. In the first 30 days, 307 people redeemed free products.
That number sounds small, but think about what happens next. Someone earns points buying Energy & Focus and redeems a free Calm & Clarity tin. They try it. They like it. Now they're buying two product lines instead of one. The free product is doing double duty as a reward and a cross-sell.
"The play from day one was cross-selling through loyalty. If someone's buying a bunch of Energy and Focus gum, we want to get Calm and Clarity or Sleep and Recharge into their hands. Points make that happen without us having to discount anything."
Expiration as a marketing lever
Brinna cut points expiration from 24 months to 12 and switched to rolling per-transaction expiry. The old window wasn't doing anything for them.
"The two-year expiration window made it nearly impossible to build urgency into the program. There's no good email strategy for 'your points expire in 18 months.' Shortening it to 12 months gave us something we could actually market around."
With 12-month rolling, each purchase starts its own clock, and the team can run re-engagement campaigns at a cadence that makes sense through Klaviyo.
Loyalty as a marketing channel
The biggest shift was philosophical. Brinna stopped treating loyalty as a feature and started treating it as a marketing channel.
"We brief campaigns now and loyalty has its own line item right next to email and paid and social. It's not this afterthought that someone remembers to check on once a quarter. Every team touches it."
The email agency rebuilt post-purchase flows with loyalty baked in. Package inserts promote referrals. Social runs loyalty-specific content. That's a huge difference from six months prior, when it was hardly mentioned in a campaign brief.
"Receipt scanning was something I was excited about from the start. We have 20,000 retail doors. If someone buys our gum at Whole Foods and we can still bring them into our loyalty ecosystem, that changes the whole equation for us."
VIP tiers scale the earning rates: 1x for Members, 1.25x for Insiders ($100+ lifetime), 1.5x for All Access ($500+ lifetime). 25,420 people have hit Insider. 1,224 have hit All Access.
From 30% retention to 61.8%
Two weeks after relaunch, Brinna was already watching the data. Redemptions spiked on day one. Member sign-ups weren't climbing as fast as she expected, but everything else was moving.
"New member growth, redemption rates, purchase frequency, AOV, all of it was trending in the right direction. The people in the program were engaging with it in a way they weren't before."
The numbers that came back were strong. Redeeming members hit a 61.8% repeat purchase rate, compared to 12.0% for non-members: a 5.15x gap. Customer lifetime value landed at $163.61 vs $61.08, a 2.68x lift. Purchase frequency reached 3.0 orders per year vs 1.2. AOV came in at $54.63 vs $49.42, a 10.5% bump.
The team wanted 50-60% retention. Redeeming members hit 61.8%.
"Our redeeming members were ordering almost three times per year while non-members were at 1.1. And our loyalty AOV was outperforming non-loyalty by over 50%. The data was there. We just needed to build the program those numbers deserved."
11,463 redemptions. 8,684 redeeming members. 309 referrals at a 46.5% conversion rate. 29M+ points sitting in the system as future purchase intent.
A redeeming member generates $102.53 more per year than a non-member. Across 8,684 active redeemers, that adds up.
The playbook for consumable brands
Gum gets chewed in a week. The replenishment cycle is short. If you can get a customer to try a second product line through a free reward, and they like it, you've doubled their basket without spending a dollar on paid acquisition. That's the whole play.
Free product rewards collapse the distance between "I've heard of that flavor" and "I buy it monthly." For brands selling consumables and competing with Amazon and retail shelves for the repeat purchase, Neuro figured out the move: make the reward the product itself.
A few of the features Neuro uses at Rivo
Neuro built their loyalty program using Rivo's points-based loyalty system, VIP tiers, referral program, free product rewards, Klaviyo integration, and customer accounts.
