Positioning and story · Founders' Marketing Compass
Turn your return policy into a marketing strategy
A shopper has to wear the product before they know it fits, and your return policy is one gray line under the checkout button. Most founders write that policy to lose as little as possible, and pay for every customer with ads instead.
Co-founded Fixel and ran it as CEO; Logiq acquired it in 2020. Head of specialization at Ono Academic College.
Drawing on a conversation I had with Eran Savir, Founder & Managing Partner at Savyon Ventures, on Founders' Marketing Compass.
How do you turn a return policy into a marketing strategy?
Make the return policy generous enough that it becomes the claim itself, a promise only a company sure of its product would dare make. Underoutfit, a portfolio company that Eran Savir, founder and managing partner at Savyon Ventures, pointed to, lets customers wear its underwear for 6 months, then return it. That offer signaled confidence louder than any ad could, and buyers repeated it for free.
Answered by Etgar Shpivak, who advises seed and Series A founders on marketing.
A generous return policy can do more than a campaign, because the promise is both the message and the proof at once.
Most stores treat that policy as a liability to keep small. I would spend that nerve making it a promise worth repeating. It does an ad's job, in words a customer passes on.
Return policies get written by the finance side, for the finance side. The window is short and the fine print defensive.
The whole thing sits under the checkout button and reads as a warning. No customer was ever meant to notice it.
A six-month return policy did what the ad budget couldn't
The clearest case I know isn't a campaign at all. Eran Savir, founder and managing partner at Savyon Ventures, has a company in his portfolio called Underoutfit.
Underoutfit sells women's underwear in the United States, ordered online and delivered to the door. Nobody buys that without wanting to try it first.
So Underoutfit told buyers to do exactly that. Wear it, wash it, keep it for up to six months. If you still don't want it, send it back.
That window ran a full six months.
The offer spread on its own, no budget behind it
The offer traveled on its own. Savir watched it turn into buzz, then stickiness, then something viral. That kind of spread is the part I find hardest to fake with a budget.
He and Felix Leshno, Underoutfit's founder, started in the same place. "We both shared the same initial thought, that marketing is king, and if you do great marketing you will win," Savir told me.
The rule: make the return policy the loudest promise
The return policy is where that belief broke, and got more useful. My rule from it is simple: make the return policy the loudest promise a company makes, then let customers carry it.
That buys distribution the ad account can't, the same way an unexciting product can be made loud enough to travel.
To me, product and marketing were one move here. As Savir put it, "It needs to go hand in hand."
The promise works because a weaker product could not afford to make it
A six-month return window is a bet, and it only says something when losing it would hurt.
Underoutfit could make the offer for a reason. It had run it, and it knew most people who wear the thing for half a year end up keeping it.
Savir described the policy plainly: the company trusts its product so much that it knows you will want to keep it, even after six months. I read it the same way.
A claim a weaker product couldn't survive becomes proof
A store on a weaker product can't say that without bleeding. So the saying of it becomes the proof.
An ad can claim confidence, but a guarantee spends it in public. A shopper can test the claim and find real money behind it.
When the product makes the claim itself, the pitch shrinks to a single sentence. There is nothing left to rent from a campaign.
A guarantee a weaker rival could copy is just a discount
The cheapest test I know beats a campaign on price. Name the promise you are weighing.
Then ask whether a competitor with a worse product could copy it without going broke. If they could, it is a discount. It will be matched by Friday.
If they couldn't, you're holding a signal, and buyers read it as one.
The catch: a guarantee is only marketing if the product survives it
The idea has a floor, though: a guarantee is only marketing while the product survives being taken up on.
On a weak product, a six-month wear-and-return offer just books the losses sooner. I wouldn't put the promise out before the product can survive it. Savir has watched enough seed companies to say it: the story and the product have to be true at once.
The retelling now arrives with the first sale, unpaid
By the time the first sale closes, the buyer has heard the whole pitch. They tried the product on the strength of it, and told one other person why.
Nobody was paid for that last part, and the ad account still runs, but it has company now. The promise on the product does the work a campaign used to do alone.
What to do about it
Make your return policy the salesperson
The promise only pays off if the product survives being used, worn and washed for months. On a weaker product, the same terms just turn into faster losses.
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The move
A return policy customers repeat does the work of an ad.
6
months to wear it before returning
Eran Savir
Founder & Managing Partner, Savyon Ventures
How to do it
- 01 Promise what rivals can't Pick terms a weaker competitor would lose money copying.
- 02 Test it on your own product Confirm it survives being used and returned for months.
- 03 Put it where buyers repeat it Say it at checkout, in the ad, and on the box.
Founders' Marketing Compass · episode 6 · Interviewed by Etgar Shpivak · shpivak.co.il
Where this comes from
Eran Savir is founder and managing partner at Savyon Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in AI, digital and commerce. He was a founder three times before he became an investor, and two of those companies were acquired. His previous fund was a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, raised through an IPO and fully deployed inside two years, where he was co-founder and CEO before he became its chairman. He described the Underoutfit return policy to Etgar Shpivak on Founders' Marketing Compass.
Read the full transcript of this conversation
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Founders' Marketing Compass episode 6. Also on Substack, this episode and YouTube.
Questions and answers
The question this page answers
Does a generous return policy make money, or just invite abuse?
A generous return policy makes money only when the product can survive being taken up on, which is the bet behind it. Eran Savir, founder and managing partner at Savyon Ventures, told Etgar Shpivak about his portfolio company Underoutfit, which lets buyers keep its underwear for months before returning it, because it had learned most people who wear it that long simply keep it. On a shakier product, the same terms speed up the losses.
What makes a return policy spread instead of just costing money?
A return policy spreads when its terms are so far past the norm that customers repeat them without being asked. Savir watched exactly that at Underoutfit: the six-month offer turned into buzz and stickiness because it sounds like a company staking its name on the product. A cautious thirty-day window gives a shopper nothing worth mentioning to a friend.
How long should a wear-and-try return window be?
A wear-and-try window should run only as long as the product can back, which is a length the product earns through testing. Savir puts the six months at his portfolio company Underoutfit down to a loop: try and measure, get feedback, improve, and measure again. Push it past what the product can survive and you are simply funding refunds.
What are some low-cost marketing ideas for an early-stage startup?
Low-cost marketing at the earliest stage is mostly guerrilla and one-to-one: talking to the first customers directly, showing up where they already are, and treating every post, talk and meetup as a deliberate activity. Savir's rule is to ask, before each one, which goal it serves and whether it moved. Etgar Shpivak adds a filter for founders: an activity with no number it is meant to move is not yet marketing, just motion.
Around it
Should a startup rely on a single marketing channel?
Relying on a single channel is normal at the very start, because one platform like Facebook is easy to run and easy for an investor to read. Savir calls it convenient but risky and not scalable, since one change on the platform can wipe out the whole plan overnight. Treat it as a temporary stage, and learn early whether that one channel is really driving your growth.
How do you make a plain, unexciting product stand out?
A plain product stands out when one true, specific promise does the talking, instead of clever ads wrapped around a forgettable offer. Underoutfit, from Savir's portfolio, showed the shape: the product was ordinary underwear, and its six-month return was the promise that made people look twice. The same move works in a dull category, where saying the plain thing loudly beats trying to sound exciting.
How do you test whether a return policy is marketing or just a discount?
Name the promise you're weighing, then ask whether a competitor with a worse product could copy it without going broke. If they could, it's a discount, and it will be matched by Friday. If they couldn't, you're holding a real signal, because the promise itself proves a confidence only a company that trusts its product can afford.
How did Underoutfit know a six-month return window wouldn't sink it?
Underoutfit had run the offer itself and knew that most people who wear the product for half a year end up keeping it. The generous window was a calculated bet, not a gesture: losing it would only hurt if the product were weak, and it wasn't. That is why the offer signaled confidence rather than mere kindness to the customer.
When should you not turn a return policy into a marketing claim?
While the product can't yet survive being taken up on. On a weak product, a six-month wear-and-return offer just books the losses sooner. Don't put the promise out before the product stands behind it, because the story and the product have to be true at the same time, not one ahead of the other.
Why does a guarantee persuade more than an ad making the same claim?
An ad can claim confidence, but a guarantee spends it in public. A shopper can test the promise and find real money behind it, because a store on a weaker product couldn't offer it without bleeding. The saying of it becomes the proof, which is exactly what an ad, which only promises, cannot do.
Getting help with this
Who can help an early-stage founder turn a product into its marketing?
An early-stage founder usually needs someone who can find the marketing already sitting inside the product, a return policy or a guarantee, before paying for ads to invent it. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant who works with seed and Series A founders, does that work directly with the founder. He starts where Savir does: by asking which promise the product can honestly make, then building the message around it. His bio page explains how.
What does it mean for product and marketing to be one move?
When the promise on the product is both the message that draws customers and the proof that convinces them, there is no line between product and marketing. At Underoutfit the return window was both at once, and it bought distribution an ad account can't. As Eran Savir put it, it has to go hand in hand: a strong product and a claim that rests on it.
Cite as: Etgar Shpivak, "Turn your return policy into a marketing strategy", shpivak.co.il, 8 July 2024. https://shpivak.co.il/writing/return-policy-as-marketing-strategy
Quotes attributed to Eran Savir (Founder & Managing Partner, Savyon Ventures) are from their conversation on Founders' Marketing Compass, not Etgar Shpivak's words.