How SAXX Underwear Increased AOV by Nearly $3 With Onward's Checkout+

A Premium Innerwear Brand Shipping at Scale, in Two Markets

SAXX built a category on getting one product exceptionally right. Since launching its first line, the brand has become a widely recognized name in men's underwear and apparel, selling direct-to-consumer alongside a wide wholesale and retail footprint. It runs that DTC business as separate storefronts for its U.S. and Canadian customers, each with its own catalog, carriers, and shipping realities.

That structure is what makes the post-purchase experience hard. SAXX moves a very high volume of orders across both markets, so even small per-order frictions multiply into cost and support load: a lost package, a late delivery, a "where is my order" ticket. Underwear is also a repeat-purchase category, which means the moment after the first order matters as much as the order itself. At this volume, post-purchase is an operating line that either leaks money or makes it.

The Challenge

Two Jobs on Every Order, Without Two Cost Lines

Some share of every brand's packages will be lost, stolen, or delayed, and the only question is who pays for it. Most brands carry that cost themselves and treat it as the price of shipping at scale. For a brand at SAXX's volume, that framing is too small. It solves one job, protecting the order, and ignores the other job that matters just as much in a repeat category, bringing the customer back.

The usual fixes make the math worse. Absorb the risk and a bad stretch of carrier performance eats margin. Bolt on a third-party protection app and you've added a SaaS fee, another vendor, and another dashboard, and you're still only plugging leaks. Run two storefronts and every one of those costs threatens to double.

SAXX didn't want another protection line item. It wanted an order upgrade that could carry both jobs at once, protect the order and pull the customer back, and pay for itself across both markets instead of adding cost to either.

The Solution

An Order Upgrade That Funds Protection and Retention

SAXX activated Onward's Checkout+, the order upgrade customers opt into at checkout. Instead of SAXX paying a subscription to protect orders, customers add the upgrade themselves, and the revenue it generates funds the entire post-purchase stack at zero SaaS fees to SAXX.

The point of the upgrade is that it does two jobs from one opt-in. It funds order protection on the shipments that go wrong, and it funds CashBack rewards that send customers back for a second purchase. One upgrade, priced into the order the customer already wanted, covers both the protection side and the retention side of the post-purchase experience.

Because customers fund the upgrade, its value scales with order volume instead of adding cost. And because it funds the rest of the platform, SAXX runs branded tracking across more than 280,000 shipments in both markets, CashBack rewards, and claims coverage on the orders that need it, without added fees. The upgrade pays for the platform; SAXX doesn't.

One Model, Two Markets

Extending the Upgrade Across the Border

SAXX proved the model on its U.S. storefront, then extended the same Checkout+ upgrade to its Canadian business, where the shipping picture looks different. Canadian orders move through a different carrier mix, with the longer and more variable transit that comes with serving a second country. That variability is exactly the kind of risk an order upgrade is built to absorb.

Rather than stand up a separate protection vendor for each market, SAXX runs one upgrade economics model across both. The customer in Toronto opts into the same kind of upgrade as the customer in Texas, and it funds the same two jobs: protection on the order and CashBack to bring them back. For a brand expanding internationally, that's a significant advantage. Cross-border growth usually means more vendors and more fixed cost per region. Here it meant running a model that had already paid for itself once, a second time.

The Results

$226K of Value, Split Between Protection and Retention

Across 76,707 upgraded orders in the U.S. and Canada, Checkout+ did two things at once. By offering the upgrade at checkout, it added close to $3 to the average order, an AOV lift SAXX captures on every upgrade at no SaaS fee. It also returned $226K in total value to SAXX and its customers, funded by the upgrade rather than by SAXX. Nearly $3 an order sounds like nothing until you multiply it across 76,707 orders.

What makes the result sturdy is how evenly it splits between the upgrade's two jobs. Roughly half of the $226K is repeat revenue driven by CashBack, the retention side. The other half is protection payouts and order-issue credits on the shipments that went wrong, the protection side. The upgrade does both jobs at close to equal weight, which is the whole point of pricing it as an upgrade instead of a cost line.

The retention side is where the model compounds. CashBack rewards give customers store credit that pulls them back for a second purchase, the single most important moment in a repeat-purchase category like innerwear. Across both markets, CashBack has driven roughly $100K in revenue at about a 12x multiple: for every dollar of CashBack customers redeem, SAXX sees roughly twelve in downstream revenue. That's the difference between a protection tool and an LTV tool. One stops losses. The other builds the next order.

Put together, across both storefronts:

• 76,707 orders upgraded across the U.S. and Canada

• Nearly $3 added to average order value on every upgrade

• $226K in total value delivered from Onward

• Roughly $100K in CashBack-driven repeat revenue, at about a 12x multiple

• More than 280,000 shipments tracked across both markets

All of it on a single stack, at zero SaaS fees, replacing what would otherwise be several point solutions and several invoices in each market.

Takeaways for High-Volume DTC Brands

1. Price the upgrade, not the protection. When customers fund an order upgrade at checkout, the post-purchase experience stops being a cost line and becomes value that scales with order volume. For SAXX, the upgrade adds close to $3 to the average order, at zero SaaS fees.

2. One upgrade can do two jobs. Protecting an order is table stakes. The stronger move is making the same upgrade carry retention too. SAXX's value split almost evenly between protection and CashBack-driven repeat revenue, which is how a post-purchase stack starts to move customer lifetime value instead of just capping losses.

3. The model travels. A self-funding upgrade doesn't need to be rebuilt market by market. SAXX runs the same Checkout+ economics across its U.S. and Canadian storefronts, so expanding into a second market didn't mean a second protection vendor or a second cost structure.

For a brand shipping at SAXX's scale, in more than one market, post-purchase economics aren't a detail. They're a choice: pay to protect orders, or let the orders pay for themselves.

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