Building a community of advocates and lifelong Chubbies customers

Featuring Tom Montgomery

Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer at Chubbies

In this Gladly podcast episode, Tom Montgomery, Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer of Chubbies, gives his perspective on the power of building community amongst a customer base and on how text message is becoming the customer service channel of choice.

Learn from the leader of Chubbies, a brand that's not only known for their bright colored, retro-style shorts, but more importantly, for their close-knit community of advocates and loyal fans.

Tom calls the Chubbies community the brand's fifth co-founder. Most of its social media is user-generated content, and the team hires most of its models out of its customer base. Customer service plays a part too, by giving people experiences good enough to retell. When one customer wrote in that his shorts had vanished from a gym locker, the team sent him karate lessons.

"It's one of the things that we've tried to embody in the way we approach customer service and customer experience, in general, is give people such positive experiences and such interestingly positive experiences that they become stories and they become conversations."

Tom Montgomery

Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer, Chubbies

Chubbies launched SMS with Gladly, and at the time of recording it already made up about a third of the brand's contact volume. Tom admits that surprised him, and he explains the gap text fills that chat, voice, and email leave open.

"...if you want live communication, there's not a great experience outside of SMS because your chat experience is live, but you're tied to a website. Your voice experience is live, but because it's such an arduous channel for our team to handle…and email is inherently this latent lag channel because there's so much structure to the conversation."

Tom Montgomery

Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer, Chubbies

Tom also talks about Foundation 43, a Chubbies foundation that supports mental health. It's named for the 43 muscles in your face that show, or sometimes hide, how you're feeling. At the time of recording, Chubbies planned to launch it in May with four partner organizations.