Native subscription integration and beverage-specific expertise drove 78% customer adoption—a 29% increase—while eliminating operational friction for a fast-growing $80M brand.
Brez is a non-alcoholic beverage brand offering innovative drink options for health-conscious consumers seeking flavorful alternatives without the alcohol.
When you're shipping non-alcoholic beverages nationwide, delivery problems aren't just inconvenient. They're expensive and recurring.
Brez faced challenges that most DTC brands never encounter. Beverages freeze and break during winter shipping. Subscription customers expect their monthly orders to arrive intact, every time. High-value THC products command premium prices that make every damaged shipment costly to replace.
The company was seeing mid-eight figures in annual revenue with a growing subscription base, but their previous shipping protection provider (SavedBy) wasn't covering subscription orders at all. This meant 40% of their customer base had zero protection on recurring shipments. Every frozen package, every broken bottle, every damaged order meant lost product, frustrated subscribers, and overwhelmed support teams deciding whether to absorb the cost or risk losing a recurring customer.
With Nick Shackelford (DTC influencer and industry leader) as a partner, the brand had visibility but needed operational excellence to match. Most critically, they needed a protection partner who understood subscription dynamics and could automatically protect recurring orders without adding friction to their customer experience.
Onward's native integration with Stay.ai (Brez's subscription platform) solved what SavedBy couldn't: automatic protection for all recurring subscription orders. When customers opt into protection on their initial order, every subsequent subscription shipment is automatically protected with zero setup required from Brez's team.
Unlike SavedBy, which wasn't able to properly cover recurring subscription orders, Onward ensures comprehensive protection across Brez's entire customer base. This 40% increase in coverage means more customers are protected, more revenue is retained when issues occur, and Brez captures the full value of their shipping protection program as subscription revenue grows.
The integration is completely automated. Customers manage their protection subscription just like any other product in their recurring order, adding or removing coverage with one click. For Brez, this means protection coverage that compounds with subscription growth rather than creating operational bottlenecks.
Non-alcoholic beverages face unique shipping vulnerabilities that standard protection doesn't address well. Products freeze during winter transit. Bottles break in rough handling. Liquid damage claims require different handling than apparel returns or electronics replacements.
Onward's claims process accounts for these category-specific challenges. When damage patterns emerged during cold snaps, Onward's team recognized these as seasonal shipping issues rather than fraud patterns. When specific carriers showed higher breakage rates, Onward helped Brez identify which 3PL relationships needed attention.
This specialized approach to liquid product protection means faster claim resolution, fewer customer friction points, and support teams who understand that a spike in damaged shipments during winter isn't suspicious, it's physics.
Brez achieved a 78% opt-in rate for Onward's Checkout+ service, up from 49% with SavedBy. This 29 percentage point improvement represents a 59% relative increase in customer adoption. This dramatic improvement is driven by:
78% attach rate on shipping protection. This represented a 29 percentage point improvement over the 49% adoption rate Brez achieved with SavedBy, validating Onward's subscription-focused value proposition for premium beverage customers.
Automatic subscription coverage at scale. Once a customer opted into protection on their first order, all future subscription shipments were automatically covered. This created a compounding value effect where revenue share scaled with subscription growth, and customers never had to make the protection decision twice.
40% coverage expansion. Moving from SavedBy to Onward eliminated the subscription protection gap entirely, bringing previously unprotected recurring orders under coverage without adding operational overhead.
Support transformation through direct collaboration. When complex cases arose (suspected fraud, carrier issues, seasonal damage spikes), resolution happened in real-time through direct Slack collaboration rather than traditional ticketing systems.
Intelligent fraud detection without customer friction. Onward's system helped Brez automatically approve claims from known good subscribers while flagging suspicious patterns. The claims process accounted for seasonal damage patterns, recognizing that a spike in damaged shipments during a cold snap isn't fraud.
Partnership, not just platform. Rather than submitting tickets to a general support queue, Brez's team messaged directly in Slack. When damage patterns emerged with specific carriers, Onward's team helped Brez identify which 3PL relationships needed attention. When subscription protection needed configuration changes, Onward made them happen without requiring Brez engineers to build custom solutions.
Upfront value alignment. Beyond ongoing protection, Onward was able to pull forward some of the anticipated value to help Brez plan for Q4 inventory. This financial flexibility gave Brez additional runway to invest in growth while maintaining comprehensive shipping protection across their subscription base.
Brez switched to Onward to solve a straightforward problem: protect beverage shipments, including subscriptions, without adding operational burden or upfront costs. What they got was a protection platform that integrates natively with their subscription infrastructure, provides hands-on support through direct Slack collaboration, and understands the specific challenges of shipping premium liquid products nationwide.
Most importantly, they eliminated the 40% protection gap that left their subscription customers vulnerable. As Brez's subscription base grows, their protection coverage scales automatically, turning shipping protection from an operational liability into a compounding asset that grows with recurring revenue.
.png)