The thing I keep coming back to is how fast we shipped things together. The Rivo team has been a dream to work with. The program is on autopilot now.
A drop-day audience with nowhere to belong
nuuds builds everyday essentials for people who want their clothes to feel as honest as they look. Tees, denim, loungewear, swim, pajamas, activewear, cut for real bodies and dropped in seasonal runs. The community waits for those drops. The team wanted to build against that.
Apparel basics is a category with a hard math problem. A customer finds a shirt she loves, buys it, and the next time she needs a tee she has forgotten whose site it came from. nuuds had plenty of first-time buyers. The team needed a way to make the second trip feel like coming home.
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Why a points program was off the table
The default playbook would have been a points program. The nuuds team rejected it on day one. The brand already runs sales, and stacking points on top of storewide promos creates a mushy economics problem where nobody pays full price. Points are also abstract for fashion. A customer who earned 450 points has no clear answer to what that gets her at the next drop.
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Hiding the Add to Cart button felt aggressive at first. We sat with it for a while. But the whole point of a drop is the rush of being first, and if a non-member could check out at the same time as a member, we weren't giving members anything real. Once we lived with the idea, it clicked. Members are paying to be first. That's the product.
The nuuds Insider Club
nuuds had been running on Rivo for almost a year before membership came up. The brand first moved to Rivo Accounts in late 2024, when Status, their previous passwordless-auth provider, shut down. They expanded to Rivo Gift Cards the following year, replacing a legacy store-credit tool and cutting platform cost by roughly half in the process. By mid-2025 the team had enough confidence in the stack to bet the next chapter on it.
That chapter was the nuuds Insider Club.
The build
Planning started in August 2025. Hannah Csontos, then customer experience lead at nuuds, ran working sessions with the Rivo team through the fall, biweekly at first and then weekly as launch approached. The brief was short, membership that earns its price tag.
Three product decisions shaped the program.
- Paid membership. A $12 monthly fee filtered for commitment. The people who pay are the people who plan to come back.
- Access first. Exclusive early access to new drops.
- PDP-level gating. Member-only products would hide the Add to Cart button for non-members. A shopper could land on the product page from TikTok, from a newsletter, from a Google search. She could read the fabric story, see the fit on the model, pick a size. She could not check out. The only way through that wall was joining.
Member benefits
- $25 welcome credit the moment a member signs up.
- Free shipping on every order.
- Exclusive early access to new drops.
- Surprise-and-delight credits that pulse through the year, each with its own expiry window.
The membership runs $12 a month with no contract. Cancel anytime, keep the benefits through the end of the period.
How the gating works
The PDP-level gating is the part of the program that does the real work. On member-only and early-access products, nuuds hides the Add to Cart button for shoppers outside the club. Shopify Flow assigns the gating tags. Rivo enforces them at the account and checkout layer. The nuuds theme swaps the Add to Cart button for a membership prompt whenever a non-member lands on a gated page.
That design turns every drop into two events at once: a marketing moment for members and a conversion moment for everyone else.
The Rivo stack
nuuds runs Rivo across the full post-purchase and membership experience.
- Rivo Accounts: passwordless login, wishlists, saved carts, order history, and a unified profile that follows shoppers across web and mobile.
- Rivo Memberships: $12 a month paid tier with onboarding, automated rebill, and self-serve cancellation flows.
- Rivo Gift Cards: welcome credits, surprise-and-delight rewards, and a per-event expiry ledger that lets credits be timed against specific drops or campaigns.
- Fuego: mobile app that mirrors the member experience, including early access gating and credit redemption.
- Klaviyo: lifecycle flows and member-segment triggers for drop announcements, credit expiry reminders, and retention campaigns.
All of it runs against a single customer record. Whether someone signs up on mobile, browses on desktop, or redeems during a drop window, Rivo holds the same profile, the same credits, the same member status.
Launch and iteration
The team hit their November 3 launch with a three-week soft open that surfaced the usual edge cases before the full rollout. A Canadian customer slipped through before geo-blocking was finalized. The welcome credits expired faster than intended, a timing issue the Rivo team caught on a BFCM prep call and patched before peak. The Shopify Flow tag logic needed two passes to handle cancellations without gaps. By late January, the weekly membership sync between nuuds and Rivo dropped to monthly. The product was running on its own.
Members come back and shop more
Five and a half months after launch, the signal is clean.
- 98% weekly member repeat rate vs 35% for non-members.
- 3.2x higher lifetime repeat purchase rate (50.4% members, 15.8% non-members).
- 3.1x higher customer lifetime value.
- +37% higher AOV on member orders.
- 5.6x more purchases per member across the same window.
- 82% member retention at 5.5 months in.
- 1,504 signups and 7,303 member orders placed.
Members come back week over week, spend more per order, and stick around long after the welcome credit is spent. That behavior follows from access. When members are the only people who can buy the drop at noon, they show up at noon.
The playbook for drop-driven brands
Most loyalty programs pay customers to come back. The nuuds Insider Club charges customers for the privilege of coming back early.
That flip changes the psychology. Members have money in the game, which shifts how they relate to the brand. The brand has a committed audience, which shifts how it designs drops.
For nuuds, access is the most durable loyalty lever. Discounts get commoditized and sign-up bonuses work exactly once. Early access to the product a customer already wants keeps earning its keep, drop after drop.
