Pret a Manger

About Pret.   

Pret is an international on-the-go food and drink retailer founded in 1986 and running over 500 shops across the UK, France, UK, and Hong Kong. I was the content designer working in the digital product team, including the subscription proposition, Club Pret.

Launching Club Pret across global markets.

To take the strategic differentiator of the Pret Coffee subscription to the next level the business redefined the core offering to not only include beverages but also a 20% redemption off food, renaming the proposition to Club Pret. I was part of the team building subscriptions and rolling out this new product to three markets, namely the UK, the US, and France across both the app and the web.

Translating business requirements into customer benefits.

As part of the discovery process, the UX Product Designer and I held a series of interviews and workshops with stakeholders to find out the key messaging, new products, redemption rules, and benefits that would inform the content hierarchy across the various user journeys for Club Pret. Holding a regular cadence of meetings with Legal and Marketing informed us about new requirements, and constraints around narrative, positioning, and terminologies.

On a need-to-know basis.

The Club Pret subscription features many user journeys, from Non-Subscribers to Active Subscribers as well as Paused and Cancelled. Many UX problems needed to be solved, for example, when Active Pret Coffee subscribers were transitioning to Club Pret the product came with new benefits, but also a price increase. This had to be communicated sensitively, which meant frontloading important information carefully, and at the right time. There were many variations in the content, as per user journey. For example, in the subscription listing for an Active Subscriber, we didn’t want to reinforce the monthly subscription price as the customer is already paying, which was different from a Non-Subscriber user journey where price is essential to making a decision to give it a go.

Pause a wee while.

Pause was a feature in the subscription journey that was long overdue for an overhaul. Initially, the problem was that customers were only able to pause their subscription for it to take effect at their next billing cycle and not immediately. So we worked on updating this to allow pause to take effect right there and then (well, from the next midnight after the customer requested it.) From a business perspective, this would have a direct positive impact on retention as it would mean customers would be less likely to cancel their fave Pret drinks if they were, say, heading to the beach for a sunny holiday.

Content-wise the objective of this feature was to communicate clearly the key dates to the customer, so we created a pause information component, which included a tick-box, so the customer would take a moment to acknowledge that they understood.

Another feature was Promo Box.

Pret was looking to explore further opportunities for engagement and conversion of the Club Pret subscription through a promo box device. This would enable the business to apply benefits such as subscription discounts over a select period of time, free subscriptions, or other promo types, whenever they like. These crafted opportunities of engagement focussed on segmented cohorts, giving the business the ability to pull the lever on different promotions with select time duration, and drill down on analytics history at an individual level.

Research and define terminology.

One of the first tasks I had was to research the best terminology to use as the external name for the feature. Looking at popular terminology on Google Trends, we finally landed on ‘Promo Codes.’

Promo Code taxonomy.

Next up, I created a Promo Code Taxomony, which was basically a set of rules defining how Promo Codes are created. In order to do this we had to think about the different use cases for Pret Internal Employees, Customer Support, and Corporate Customers. We also had to create Promo Code rules for marketing activities, like Promotions, Influencers, and Competitions. Other segments to consider were the key user types like Non-Subscribers, Active Subscribers, and Cancelled. The taxonomy rules took into consideration whether the business needed to create Generic or Specific Promo Codes, character count as well as prefix and suffix rules. The Promo Code Taxonomy document was then shared across the business in Branding, PR, Legal, and Commercial across all three markets to enable consistency both internally and externally.

Promotion Description Taxonomy.

As part of the Promo Box feature, I also created and documented all the product labels and types of offers featured in the core product. The product copy followed the following taxonomy formula:

[Description of label] [Description of offer] e.g., First-month offer:[NUMBER]% off

Helping local marketing departments write better product copy.

To enable sound UX copy to be implemented across the product within local marketing departments, we created a UX Product Copy Cheat Sheet, so that where possible we could ensure that all stakeholders had a piece of documentation giving a 101 to effective UX writing. As somebody who has seen many of these guides, I knew that the best approach for understandability was to create something easy to scan, as we all know that most people skim-read.

A star squad sending Club Pret subscriptions through the stratosphere.

Over the course of 12 months working with the Subscription App and Web Team at Pret a Manger, the pace was fast and determined. Our team managed to get 37 back-to-back deliveries over the line in 2023 alone, which was a huge accomplishment.

The subscription proposition has gone from strength to strength with a 40% increase in people taking it up, driving a 20% average attachment rate and increasing average monthly visits to the store per subscriber by 70% (April, 2023,) proving to be an incredible strategic lever in gaining market share.