To attract customers to our online brand, we added trust-building features

Name: Waldo
Location: London
Employees: 27
Founded in: 2017
Tip: “Put the same quality into a digital product as you would with a tangible one.”

The problem

When contact lens brand Waldo launched in 2017, they offered a direct-to-consumer subscription service. However, it proved hard to convince customers to switch brands. Since contact lenses are such an intimate product, people needed a lot of reassurance to trust a new supplier, particularly when the brand is exclusively online.

The solution

Since Waldo’s website is its main shop window, founder Ashleigh Hinde set out to make sure it instilled trust in potential customers.

The team started by adding an extensive FAQs page and including a customer service number and email address at the bottom. To reassure visitors that they could still get advice or talk to an optician through Waldo, the company built an Ask the Expert page too. There, Waldo’s in-house optician would answer any customer questions. 

Waldo also set up a 10-day free trial of their contact lenses. This helped to build trust by giving customers a risk-free chance to test Waldo’s claims themselves. Once a customer tried the product, they were encouraged to give user reviews or feedback. These reviews could then be posted on high-traffic pages, with the most positive comments turned into larger case studies. 

The results

Ashleigh believes the website’s transparency and their free product trials have been powerful in building customer trust. To reflect their efforts, the company currently has an 8.7 score on Trustpilot. Waldo has grown more than 350 per cent in the last year and are currently expanding into the US market.

“The greatest secret weapon for an online business is to be open and transparent,” said Ashleigh. “The features on our website instil a sense of reassurance that customers can rely on us to always be accessible if they need something.”