The Returns Fix That Helped Honeylove Retain $5M+

Returns are one of those problems that’s only going to get worse over time.=

Consumer expectations have shifted permanently. Free returns, instant refunds, no-questions-asked exchanges. Amazon trained an entire generation of shoppers to treat returns as frictionless, and every other brand is now expected to match that. 

There's no fixing the trend. But you can only build a better operation around it.

So every time I come across a brand that's cracked something real on returns, I like to dig in deeper. 

This one's about Honeylove.

Honeylove sells shapewear. Bras, bodysuits, shorts, the kind of stuff where fit is everything and buying the wrong size is almost guaranteed if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. They've invested heavily in helping customers find the right fit upfront, with detailed sizing logic that factors in cup size, band size, and several other variables. That sophistication is also what made returns particularly brutal. Every item in their catalog has five variables: size, color, version, style, cup, and band. When a customer wanted to exchange, they had to navigate that entire matrix inside a portal built for brands with two. 

Most couldn't. So they took the refund. 

At hundreds of thousands of returns a year, that added up fast.

Post-purchase platform Route came in and rebuilt Honeylove’s exchange experience from the ground up. They built a custom exchange UI, embedded chat inside the portal, and integrated across four warehouse partners in four geographies. 

The result: $5M in retained cash and a 20% reduction in support tickets.

I sat down with Bailey Newton, who led the project at Route, to get into exactly how they did it.

What’s Inside

1. Why a Standard Returns Portal Wasn't Built for a Product Like Theirs

2. How Route Diagnosed the Problem

3. The Implementation

4. The Rollout

5. The Results

6. What You Can Takeaway From This

Why a Standard Returns Portal Wasn't Built for a Product Like Theirs

Honeylove isn't your average apparel brand. They've built one of the most sophisticated front-end shopping experiences in intimates. Detailed sizing logic, personalized fit recommendations, a site that factors in cup size and band size to steer you toward the right product. Real engineering effort, real investment, real results.

And then a customer tries to make an exchange, and all of that sophistication evaporates.

The returns portal they were using before Route wasn't bad software. It was software built for a brand with two variables: size and color. Most brands are. Honeylove has five. So when a customer landed inside that portal looking to swap a product, they were on their own. No guidance. No logic. Just a catalog that was genuinely difficult to navigate without knowing exactly what you were looking for.

Most customers didn't know. So they didn't exchange. They refunded.

There's a thing that happens at scale where a broken experience that feels like a small friction point per customer becomes a structural leak in the business. Every single return was a moment where Honeylove could retain the sale or lose it. 

And the portal, through no fault of the customer, was reliably pushing them toward the loss.

They'd already tried to fix it with their previous provider. The software wasn't the problem. The problem was the provider wasn't able to customize for their specific use case. For a brand running headless on Shopify with their own internal engineering team, that matters. 

Headless means they'd gone off-road from Shopify's standard setup and built their own infrastructure on top. Any solution coming in had to be willing to work within that. Most weren't.

So the leak kept leaking.

How Route Diagnosed the Problem

Route's diagnostic process had three distinct steps. Each one built on the last, and together they gave a complete picture of what was actually broken and what fixing it would require.

Step 1: Listen to the CX Team Before Looking at Any Data

Honeylove's CX team tracks every reason a customer reaches out. When Route came in, that's where they started.

The returns process was coming up again and again. Customers said it was hard. They couldn't find the right item. They were giving up mid-exchange and taking the refund because it was easier.

That’s a specific signal: a customer who wants to exchange but can't figure out how is a completely different problem from a customer who just wants their money back. One is a lost sale you could have kept. The other is a genuine return. If you're only looking at your refund rate, you can't tell them apart. 

You need to know what customers are actually saying about why they gave up.

Step 2: Benchmark the Numbers Against Similar Brands

Route has worked with over 13,000 brands. That gives them refund rates, exchange rates, and return rates across a wide range of comparable businesses. Most individual brands have no way to know whether their numbers are normal or out of line. Route does.

"We can look at a brand and say, your refund rate is higher than what we typically see for brands similar to you," Bailey said. "Here are some strategies we can actually help you with."

Honeylove's numbers were out of line. Refund rate too high. Exchange rate too low. That gap is where the money was going, and benchmarking made it visible in a way that internal data alone couldn't.

Step 3: Trace the Gap Back to Its Root Cause

With the CX signal and the benchmarks in hand, the diagnosis became clear. Five product variables, a portal built for two, and customers defaulting to the path of least resistance every time.

It was a UI problem as much as anything else. The portal wasn't surfacing the right options to the right customer at the right moment. Customers weren't choosing refunds because they wanted refunds. They were choosing refunds because finding the right exchange was too hard.

Fix the experience, fix the numbers.

What Route Needed to Build

The diagnosis pointed directly at the solution. The portal needed to actually reflect HoneyLove's catalog. That meant a custom UI built around their five variables, one that walked customers through the exchange step by step instead of dropping them into a generic selector and hoping for the best.

The Implementation

Returns don't sit in a corner of your tech stack. They sit in the middle of it. As Bailey put it: "You integrate with the e-commerce platform, but then there's usually an ERP, a WMS, a CX tool, and then bonus stuff like loyalty, tracking, and package protection."

Every one of those integrations needs to be designed, built, and tested before a real return runs through the new system. 

For Honeylove, getting this right took 12 weeks.

Who Was in the Room

One thing that catches brands off guard is how many people a project like this actually involves. Returns touch everything, which means everyone has a stake in how they get solved.

On any given time throughout the implementation, Route was working with 15 to 20 people across the Honeylove business:

• CTO, leading the project on Honeylove's side

• Customer service team

• Marketing

• Supply chain and operations

If you're going into a project like this expecting a small, contained technical implementation, reset that expectation. Getting the right people aligned early, especially on the operational and CX side, is what separates a smooth rollout from one that drags.