Subscription commerce lives and dies on mechanics most product teams underinvest in: the trial-to-paid handoff, the payment failure recovery flow, the pause option that quietly saves a third of would-be cancels. I spent nearly eight years building exactly these systems at CaaStle, the platform behind Clothing-as-a-Service programs for Express, Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Moss Bros, and AllSaints.
What that looked like in numbers
- Led consumer experience and growth product roadmaps across a portfolio managing ~$50M+ in ARR.
- Ran a sustained A/B testing program on subscription funnels that produced 20% incremental revenue growth and a 50% cancellation save rate.
- Directed implementation of a patented one-time rental system, a new commercial model layered onto existing subscription infrastructure across partner brands.
Subscription P&L problems are diagnosable. Acquisition-heavy growth with weak month-two retention is a merchandising or expectation-setting problem. Healthy engagement with rising involuntary churn is a payments problem. High pause rates with low reactivation is a lifecycle communication problem. The discipline is knowing which lever you're actually pulling and instrumenting it honestly, cohort by cohort, instead of trusting blended averages that flatter the dashboard.
How I help subscription commerce teams
Typical engagements: a funnel and retention audit (two to three weeks, ending in a ranked experiment backlog with revenue estimates); a fractional role running your growth pod for a quarter or two; or a specific build (a pause/downgrade flow, a winback program, a billing recovery system) taken from spec to ship.
I've also founded two companies of my own, so the recommendations respect engineering constraints and payback math rather than assuming an enterprise-sized team. If your subscription metrics have plateaued and the ideas on the whiteboard all feel like guesses, that's exactly the situation this work is for.