About
As Lilac St. scaled subscriptions and multi-channel growth, founder Alicia Zeng ran into a baseline problem: key metrics were scattered across tools, and it was too slow to answer questions like “what’s driving LTV?” and “did that discount actually help?”
With SourceMedium and Loop, the team centralized reporting and got a real-time view of subscriber value, discount impact, and ROI. They reported a 16% MER run-rate increase (alongside a 43% GMV increase) and clearer visibility into repeat and subscriber behavior.
Lilac St. sells eyelash extension products via DTC and Amazon. The team wanted to keep scaling while staying profitable, without spending founder time rebuilding reporting in spreadsheets.
The challenge
- Reporting lived across Shopify, Google, and subscription tooling, with different definitions and time slices.
- Subscription growth and discount decisions needed a view of LTV and repeat behavior the team could trust.
- Manual “pull and reconcile” work didn’t scale with a growing channel mix.
In the early days, Alicia spent far more time than she’d hoped pulling analytics from dashboards and tools like Shopify, Google, and Recharge (before they moved to Loop) to make sense of growth.
It was less about the time-suck and more about keeping pace with the company’s growth. As Lilac St.’s needs became more complex, they needed solutions to help them get granular while simultaneously consolidating large swaths of data into an authoritative source.
They needed all their tools to talk to each other.
“When you’re a young company, the numbers just need to be directional so that you know you’re “generally” headed the right way. But as our business needs became more sophisticated, we knew we needed a platform that could provide us with detailed analytics and reporting.”
Since each platform uses different terminology and time slices, obtaining comprehensive insights without spending untold hours “jerry-rigging” a system that would work in the short term was challenging.
Lilac St. needed something comprehensive, streamlined, and authoritative.
The solution
- Loop upgraded the subscription experience and gave the team more control over offers and bundles.
- SourceMedium centralized reporting so subscriber value, discounts, and ROI could be evaluated on one baseline.
- The team used that baseline to measure changes quickly and make decisions without stitching dashboards together.
When Lilac St. moved from Recharge to Loop Subscriptions, it gave the brand greater freedom and customization to build compelling customer subscription offerings.
That, coupled with SourceMedium, let the team centralize reporting and reduce the amount of manual reconciliation.
Finally, they could track and analyze subscription data, marketing campaigns, operational metrics, and sales channels from one place.
That meant no more piece-mealing tools, spreadsheets, and dashboards together to understand their customer’s LTV.
“Many tools can be biased towards propping up their own features. But SourceMedium’s objective voice connects everything together, delivering only the facts.”
But beyond the time-saving benefits of working with SourceMedium and Loop, Lilac St. has significantly improved their ability to track events in real-time, ultimately allowing them to make decisions more quickly and efficiently.
A few areas they’ve taken advantage of:
- Seeing LTV of subscribers vs one-time customers.
- Centralizing their data instead of using disparate sources.
- Monitoring impacts of changes like subscription discounts.
- Tracking subscription revenue trends throughout the month.
- Understanding ROI on ad spend and optimizing across channels.
“We only used to touch on analytics periodically. But now we have a pulse on everything in real-time and can make decisions much faster.”
What changed
- Decision enabled: The team could compare subscriber vs. one-time value, monitor discount impacts, and steer spend with clearer ROI signals.
- How they validated it: Centralized reporting reduced conflicting definitions across tools and made changes measurable.
- What got faster: Faster decisions without pulling analytics from multiple dashboards.
The results
-
82% YoY growth in repeat customers
Repeat customers grew 82% year over year (through end of November 2024). -
124% higher LTV for subscribers vs. one-time customers (by month six)
By month six, subscriber LTV was 124% higher than one-time customer LTV. -
16% MER run-rate increase
Run-rate MER increased by 16%, alongside a 43% GMV increase.
With one baseline across subscriptions and growth, the team could move faster without stitching dashboards together.