Hunter & Gather first emerged as a kitchen table start-up back in 2017. Six years on and it’s now an established name in the food and nutrition space, with a broad product range all free from refined sugars, grains, and inflammatory seed oils.
With 80% of sales generated through eCommerce, building trust with consumers has been key to brand growth. As has educating them on the benefits of an ancestrally inspired diet.
Customer reviews have always played a role in this but after a rebrand three years ago the team realized there was a lot of untapped potential here.
What they needed was a product to help them unlock it.
When it came to what that product would be, there were three key boxes that needed to be ticked:
Learn more about UGC here!
Hunter & Gather found all of those things in REVIEWS.io, along with a host of other valuable tools and the technical support to make the most of them.
“We had so many people saying amazing things about the brand and we really wanted to capture that - all in one place and through one verified platform. It just helps other consumers trust in this education and the products and that was important for us.”
Hunter & Gather’s stats are pretty impressive. The brand has an average 4.9 company rating and over 7,000 individual product reviews. So, what’s the secret?
Well, first up, the team develops great products. That’s evident by how enthusiastic and complementary customers are. But they also have a very well-thought-out collection strategy in place.
It all starts with timing. The Hunter & Gather product range is diverse, including condiments and sauces, MCT oils, and supplements. For some purchases, customers can form an opinion straight away, whereas with others they need time to experience a product’s effects.
The team takes this into account and uses the REVIEWS.io + Klaviyo integration to create custom email flows, with different timings for different products. That means when a review request lands in a customer’s inbox, it lands at just the right time.
“Because we’ve got different types of products - the time of trial and results are different. So with the mayo say, you can open it, you can taste it, you can review it straight away. With collagen, it’s a slower process. You need some time to see the results. So we have flows set up depending on what products they’ve had to ask for specific reviews at certain times.”
The brand also acknowledges the influential power of visual UGC - customer photos and videos that show Hunter & Gather products in the real world. This visual aspect makes review content authentic and relatable, which is key when a lot of the brand’s customers are looking for assurance from others who suffer the same medical conditions, or have the same dietary requirements as they do.
To encourage submission of UGC, the team uses another REVIEWS.io integration, this time with LoyaltyLion, to incentivize photo and video reviews with money off vouchers. It’s a great way to prompt customers to share more of their experience and to encourage repeat purchases.
And as Amy discovered with one of the first videos submitted, this kind of content can prove to be highly effective marketing material.
“It was a lady that’s coeliac, she was trusting us as a brand, she was using the collagen products, seeing these amazing results, and sharing her experience. It’s like a video that you’d pay hundreds of pounds for from an influencer and it would be fake. But it's real, and it’s a lot more cost-effective for us.”
Visual reviews are published across the site and on individual product pages using our dynamic UGC widget. These are complimented by star ratings and text reviews, providing shoppers with plenty of social proof, and more reasons to trust in the Hunter & Gather brand.
They’re also starting to use UGC as visual ad creatives, leveraging that sense of community and shared experience for customer acquisition.
“The anecdotes of how we’ve improved customers’ health and their nutrition - those kinds of comments are really useful for other consumers that are wanting to go on this journey.”
It’s not just in a customer-facing capacity that Hunter & Gather makes use of reviews. They’re also used behind the scenes for product development.
Now given that the brand delivers great tasting, quality products as it is, the feedback that comes from customers is often around other products they’d like to see in the range. This is really valuable information to have, as it allows the brand to grow in line with customer needs and expectations.
An abundance of positive review content also gives the team reassurance that they have indeed created something that hits the mark and that they can be proud of.
“When it's your own products, something you create, often you never think it’s good enough. Or that it needs tweaking or changing. So to capture and gather feedback as to are the products good enough? Do they taste good enough? That’s really useful.”
There’s another way Hunter & Gather makes use of reviews behind the scenes too. It’s something we rarely see but really love.
Every month Amy and Jeff hold a team meeting with everyone in the business and always share the most recent top customer reviews.
It’s a fantastic way to show the team what a great job they’re doing, and in this case, the difference it’s making in people’s lives - people who might be suffering from any one of a number of health conditions and are turning to Hunter & Gather to help them improve their wellbeing through an ancestrally inspired lifestyle.
Visit the Hunter & Gather store to check out the full product range for yourself. You’ll also find a library of scientifically backed articles and healthy recipes to help with your own lifestyle journey.
Are you an eCommerce brand looking to unlock the full potential of reviews and UGC? Book a live demo of the REVIEWS.io solution to see how we can help.
