Letting subscribers choose an item in their BE KIND. box

BE KIND. by ellen is a quarterly subscription box sold through ellenshop.com, on quarterly and annual plans, filled with products from smaller brands. Every box had one item subscribers could have chosen between, but with no way to ask them, the team assigned it at random.

The box had just moved its subscriptions onto Shopify Plus and Recharge, and the team wanted choice live for the winter box, a few weeks out. Its warehouse read only order line items, not tags or notes, so every choice had to arrive as its own line on the order.

Recharge referred the BE KIND. team to DYODE. We split the work into phases: existing subscribers would choose from their account first, with choice at signup and a curated add-on grid to follow.

To ship in time, the first phase stayed inside Recharge's own customer portal and its existing Klaviyo integration instead of adding middleware between the systems.

On the subscription page of the Recharge portal we added a panel of the season's choice items. Each one is a $0 Shopify product kept in its own collection. Picking one adds it to the subscriber's next charge as a one-time item through Recharge's API, so it reaches Shopify as a separate order line the warehouse can pick.

Annual subscribers prepay, so their pick creates an order of its own. We set the date on those orders to match each subscriber's prepaid renewal, so the warehouse could merge the two into one box. For reminder emails, we used the events Recharge already sends to Klaviyo, so the team could segment subscribers by whether they had picked yet.

Feedback after the winter launch set the next round, which DYODE scoped with the BE KIND. team: larger type and clearer hover states in the portal for an audience that skews older, a curated grid of paid add-ons subscribers can tap through without leaving the page, and a way for new subscribers to choose at signup.

For the winter box, BE KIND. subscribers chose their own item from their account instead of getting one at random. Each pick reached the warehouse as its own order line, and annual subscribers' picks were merged into the same box.

The first phase also showed where Recharge's portal limits a box like this: each pick waits on a Recharge API call, and Recharge doesn't hold stock until the order drops into Shopify. Those limits shaped the plan for the next round.