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Reinventing Joe & The Juice’s digital experience, from transactions to connections

Joe & The Juice, a modern juice bar and coffee shop, set its sights on growing from 300 to over 1,000 stores.  Focused on building long-lasting, sustainable relationships with customers and maximizing store productivity, they were looking for a digital transformation that would empower their vision.

 

Empathy Lab was selected as a partner able to deliver a full collaboration – spanning digital business, CX strategy, design, build, and marketing. The result: a transformed digital ecosystem and omnichannel experience that boosted conversion, reduced checkout times, cut abandoned carts, and paved the way for future growth.

The challenge

 

Five years ago, we built Joe & The Juice's app and developed advanced data products that offered insight into consumer behavior across in-store and online touchpoints.

 

These insights showed that app users were 2.5 times more valuable than non-app users, leading Joe & The Juice to double down on its digital transformation. Joe came to Empathy Lab with a challenge centered on enhancing store productivity – aiming to create a rewards system that deepened customer engagement while streamlining in-store performance. Only by fully integrating as a collaborative partner could we deliver a comprehensive, scalable solution.

 

 

“Our Ambition ? Turn Joe & The Juice into a fully digital brand with a best-in-class customer experience.”

Nicolai Schnack

Chief Technology Officer, Joe & The Juice

Our approach

 

Scaling a brand isn’t just about adding more stores. It’s about making every customer interaction seamless, whether online or in person. After conducting extensive research, from web analytics and consumer surveys to in-store visits, we took a two-track approach:

  1. Growth track: agile, customer-focused app optimizations designed to improve conversion rates and retention right away.
  2. Strategic overhaul: a long-term plan that integrates loyalty, payments, and fulfillment across all touchpoints, ensuring every customer interaction is fluid and consistent.


This approach ensures that every short-term enhancement directly addresses customer needs while building a scalable, future-ready solution for lasting success.

“Together with Empathy Lab, we are elevating the customer experience across every touchpoint, creating a more personal, relevant Joe. Our approach to experience means we can target customers in different moments with more emotional triggers, so we can expand consideration into different demand spaces, while creating a stronger connection to the brand.”

Kasper Garnell

Head of Brand, Joe & The Juice

Our solution

 

Our solution is a platform that redefines how customers experience Joe & The Juice. It marries intuitive ordering with a reimagined loyalty ecosystem – backed by a robust tech foundation featuring a powerful combination of commercetools, Braze, Talon.One and Amplitude. The result is effortless, engaging interactions at every touchpoint. 

Quick wins: making ordering effortless 


Small changes can make a big difference. In just 30 days, we designed, launched, and A/B tested three strategic optimizations that streamlined the ordering process.

 

We knew from analyzing the data that if we could get customers to five orders, they quickly became Joe’s most valuable customers, so we focused on improving re-ordering flows. First, we added a one-tap reorder button directly into the store finder, enabling customers to quickly replicate their favorite orders.

 

Next, we integrated an intelligent reorder option into the menu exploration phase to simplify product customization.

 

Finally, we switched from a list to a map view, making it easy to identify the nearest store. Our agile approach allowed us to swiftly validate and scale these improvements, resulting in enhanced retention and a 700% payback on the growth track in just one month.

A long-term strategy for sustainable growth 

 

Beyond quick fixes, Joe & The Juice needed a loyalty program that truly resonated with its customers. We reimagined it as a dynamic marketplace, introducing exclusive perks, brand collaborations, and flexible subscription models to deepen engagement. 


To support this, we refreshed the app with new mechanics for challenges, promotions, and a streamlined ordering process. Underpinning it all was a complete rebuild of their tech architecture – ensuring the infrastructure was ready for future growth and IPO ambitions. By quantitatively and qualitatively validating our concepts in the market, we built a business case for Joe’s Board of Directors and PE investors that showed the new commerce experience would not only drive store productivity, but justify a complete digital overhaul for scale. 

 

Activating new demand, growing loyalty

 

A core objective of the new strategy was to shift users into new demand spaces and accelerate adoption of Joe’s loyalty program. To enable this at scale, we implemented human-augmented synthetic content pipelines with hyper targeted AI-generated content. The result is personalized, moment-based marketing that nudges users toward new behaviors and converts them into loyal members. This capability powers an always-on activation engine, driving acquisition and deeper engagement across all channels. 

“Shifting or spreading our peak times to underutilized hours means our stores can be more productive, and we can scale efficiently.  Adding our app has driven a more than 2X multiplier to our customer base without increasing the store level investment cost.”

Thomas Evald

Strategic Advisor, Commercial, Joe & The Juice

Impact

 

By aligning technology, design, business strategy, and marketing activation, we crafted an intuitive, end-to-end customer experience for Joe & The Juice – delivering immediate impact. This included an increase in conversion, monthly revenue, and ROI, as well as faster checkout times and fewer abandoned carts.

 

Meanwhile we set the stage for long-term growth. This Total Commerce approach seamlessly connected digital and in-store channels, enriching every touchpoint.

 

Our growth track paved the way for a redesigned app and loyalty program that goes beyond transactions, rewarding customers based on behavior and preferences. With time-based incentives, interest-based challenges, and exclusive rewards, Joe & The Juice can build deeper customer connections while improving staffing, operations, and order throughput. And the strength of the strategy secured full board and investor approval for a wider digital commerce investment.

Our work