How Only Curls Used Tapcart and KnoCommerce to Find Their TikTok Sweet Spot
The Story of Only Curls
Only Curls started to inspire curly-haired people of all textures to ditch the chemicals, forget the straighteners, and start loving their natural curls. When founder Lizzie Carter realized that she couldn’t easily find the right products for her curls, she decided it was time to take matters into her own hands.
She co-founded the brand with her then-partner, now-fiancé and co-parent of two, Hugo Lewis. With £500 of savings, they produced Only Curls’ first product: a microfiber towel for curly hair (kind of a secret hack at the time!). Lizzie sewed the labels on herself and they packed orders at their living room table.
Now, the company has grown substantially with all Only Curls products specially formulated for all types of curly and wavy hair. The team has also recently launched Little Curls, a range created for kids.
“Many people have grown up not knowing how to manage their curls,” says Lizzie. “So we’ve set about making a simple set of products that get amazing results.”
Unsurprisingly, Lizzie wasn’t the only one struggling to find products for curly hair. The Only Curls customer base and social following grew at a rapid clip. So did the speed at which their products sold out.
As the team scaled, they began to consider what tools they’d need to maintain their incredible client retention rate while also offering more best-selling products, faster restocks, and better customer support. That led the team to Tapcart’s mobile app and KnoCommerce’s customer surveys.
How OnlyCurls Found Its People on TikTok
“TikTok has a large community of beauty influencers and products go viral on the platform, but we had concerns that it wouldn’t drive sales for us. We were wrong.”
The Challenge
Because Only Curls specializes in a highly specific audience and problem — curly hair is fragile and needs special care — it is vital for the brand to solicit feedback from its customer base and develop new products accordingly. While Only Curls is based in London, there are curly and wavy manes on every continent, so the team also needed to track who was coming to their site and purchasing product — and from where. And they needed to make that purchase process as easy as possible.
How Tapcart Transformed Only Curls’ Retention Strategy
Tapcart’s mobile app solved for the “easy” part, allowing Only Curls to connect with its customer base on a deeper level, provide much-needed curly hair education and, of course, make repeat purchases a snap.
“Only Curls has a highly loyal following and a really strong repeat customer base,” says Hugo. “So having a mobile app that made ordering simple, quick, and easy just made sense. Curl care and customer service are our number one priority — all of our team is curly, and we take giving advice very seriously. So having the mobile app gives us a better platform to showcase tutorials, tips and tricks – which our customers love.”
Tapcart has also helped the team sell products faster and boosted retention.
“Being able to announce new products and restocks exclusively on the app has meant we’ve been able to rapidly grow our push notification subscriber list,” says Hugo. “Our products sell out fast — and our customers know to make sure they’re first in line, they’ll get the best access via our mobile app. So it’s a compelling way to boost retention. It’s also lightning fast, and the checkout process is seamless, which makes it VERY easy for our customers to order.”
But that was just one part of the equation. Only Curls knew that once people found them, they would keep coming back for the community, support, and chemical-free products that finally worked. But where could they find new people to join that community?
Cue Kno’s post-purchase surveys.
How KnoCommerce Drives Only Curl’s App Downloads
Only Curls knows that customers love using their Tapcart app — it encourages engagement, a higher average order value, and it drives ~30% of their revenue. The problem is, not all of their customers use it — yet.
So, the team decided to pull a simple lever to build awareness and drive Tapcart downloads. For that, they got creative with Kno’s post-purchase surveys and Tapcart integration.
Because Kno gets a 45% average response rate on its surveys, it’s the perfect place to encourage a lot of high-intent traffic to complete an “action,” such as referring a friend, joining a Facebook community or for Only Curls, pushing new and repeat customers to download their app. And it worked — with Kno, they drove an extra 1k clicks to their download page in 2 months. These are 1k customers that can now use the Tapcart mobile app to re-order and have a deeper relationship with Only Curls.
How KnoCommerce Drives Product Innovation
“Many of our newest product launches have been born out of customer feedback and suggestions for products that they want us to make,” Hugo says. “So we’ve made it happen. And when customers hear that a product they’ve suggested is in development, they love it.”
Along with dramatically improving the rate of app downloads, Only Curls began experimenting with using Know’s customizable surveys to get to know their customers even better.
“We have a large following on social — Instagram and TikTok have been hugely impactful for the growth of our business — but these days, it can be challenging to know where our customers are coming from,” says Hugo. As the Only Curls team began considering new marketing opportunities, they needed to get a better picture of where their ideal customer was spending their time (at least, when they were not doing their Sunday curl wash).
“Using Kno has been instrumental in allowing us to find out where our customers are REALLY coming from,” he says. “We don’t just ask customers how they heard about us — obviously, that helps, and we get an accurate picture from that — but we’re also able to dig deep into what our customers want from us.”
Kno has also helped Only Curls go from guesswork on new product ideas to a clear roadmap. “Many of our newest product launches have been born out of customer feedback and suggestions for products they want us to make,” Hugo says. “So we’ve made it happen. And when customers hear that a product they’ve suggested is in development, they love it.”
The Results
Beyond deepening the understanding of their customers, Only Curls also made an unexpected discovery that has shifted their marketing energy.
“One of the most interesting insights we received was quite early on, when we were starting to explore TikTok. TikTok has a large community of beauty influencers and products go viral on the platform, but we had concerns that it wouldn’t drive sales for us. We were wrong,” says Hugo. “We were able to very quickly find out that 1) our customers were using it — often up to 25% of our survey responses were attributed to TikTok. Only by using KNO we were able to uncover that there were orders driven by TikTok that were misattributed to Google — and 2) by asking them ‘how did you hear about us?’ we saw that those TikTok users were still in our ‘older’ demographic.”
The result? “Surveys gave us the confidence to double down on TikTok content creation— as well as increase our ad spend there,” Hugo says.
“Surveys gave us the confidence to double down on TikTok content creation— as well as increase our ad spend there.”
How Only Curls Plans to Use Customer Surveys Next
“Our product is a very ‘shareable’ product — if you have curly hair, there’s a good chance you’ll talk to friends and family about it — so we also encourage our customers to refer friends at the end of our surveys,” says Hugo. “We’ll continue to be customer-first in everything we do. We’ll keep asking customers for honest feedback on all of our products, but also on how we can support them with information, tutorials, and how-tos.”
Interested in learning more about what Kno and Tapcart can do for you? Schedule a demo with Kno or Tapcart today, and we’ll walk you through the surveys that Only Curls used to get their products in the hands of curly- and wavy-haired folks everywhere. Kno is also running a limited time promotion with TikTok offering up to $5k in TT credit for anyone who signs up. Sign up here.