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How do you solve a problem like…retail returns? For online clothing sellers, fixing this perennial issue while maintaining customer loyalty would truly bring the hills to life. Strategies like “bracketing,” buying several items to hedge your bet, make it more likely the consumer will have the outfit they need, but can cause all kinds of reverse logistics headaches on the other side of the trade. Swimwear is particularly return prone, with up to a 40% average return rate, according to Statista. While there’s no antidote yet for buyer’s remorse, increased personalization could hold the key.
Women’s clothing brand Carve Designs resolved to address this pain point by offering a tool to help customers find the right fit while improving retention and conversion rates. It also relied on one key assumption: People love taking quizzes.
The right fit
Launched in 2024, Carve Designs’s AI swim quiz goes beyond your average online shopping test by asking in-depth questions about swimwear preferences: where you’re planning to wear it, how you want it to make you feel, and even the body parts you’d like to conceal. AI then curates recommendations by linking these various inputs to product features like coverage, support, and fabric.
“We know as consumers, when you’re on a website, you want to get to what you’re looking for as quickly as possible,” CRO Megan Porteous said. “We decided, OK, let’s make this a really turnkey experience, so the team analyzed return data, customer reviews, and customer experience tickets.”
Porteous said over time the algorithm “gets smarter by learning from customer behavior like swim completions and returns.”
Customer satisfaction
Porteous said the initial quiz reception was immediately positive, with 60%–70% of customers completing it, “higher than industry benchmarks provided by the tool.”
The big win: Carve Designs’s AI swim quiz resulted in a four times higher conversion rate. Among quiz takers, there was also a lower return rate and a one and a half times higher average order value.
“If someone goes through the quiz, orders a style that actually meets their expectations, meets their use case, we know that that’s a very positive experience, and they’re going to come back to Carve again for a similar experience,” Porteous said.
Larger takeaways
There’s more upside for online retailers able to thread the needle of conversion, retention, and less returns. Data from Carve Designs’s AI swim quiz has helped inform larger business decisions, like its merchandising strategy where it has expanded collections such as high-rise bikini bottoms and supportive swimsuit tops.
“We are collecting a huge amount of data from our consumers on what she wants, what she wants to do in our swim, and what coverage she is after,” Porteous said. “This has actually helped spark several different areas of continued innovation.”
The success has sparked a rollout of similar quizzes for other product categories, including an AI sweater quiz relaunching this fall and an AI gift quiz for the holiday season.
“The quiz has really opened up a lot of new avenues for us,” Porteous said. “We just know that our consumer enjoys this and we try to make it fun.”