LeMieux is nominated for Digital Initiative of the Year at this year’s RG Excellence Awards. The equestrian brand’s digital and technology director Shaun Loughlin explains why they rejected discount-led loyalty and built a mobile store, rewards platform and community ecosystem instead.

When LeMieux set out to improve customer retention, the answer could easily have been another points-for-discounts loyalty scheme. Instead, the premium equestrian brand chose a more ambitious route – LeMieux Insiders, a mobile-first ecosystem combining shopping, rewards and community in one place.

Loughlin explains that the project was rooted in a clear commercial problem: “We were acquiring customers well, but our retention rate was slowly declining as we scaled.”

The challenge was how to hold on to customers without undermining what LeMieux stands for. “The standard retail answer to retention is discounting, and we weren’t willing to do that,” he shares.

“We’re a premium brand with a Royal Warrant. Training customers to wait for a code does long-term damage to margin and to positioning, so an earn-and-burn discount-driven loyalty programme wasn’t going to work for us.”

There was also a bigger opportunity beyond direct transactions. LeMieux already had an active customer community, but much of it lived on private Facebook groups and in Instagram comments. The brand did not own the experience, could not shape it, and had limited access to the insight it generated.

That mattered because LeMieux’s customer does not only buy directly from the brand. With hundreds of retail partners globally, Loughlin says the team had to think beyond ecommerce loyalty and focus on brand loyalty too.

He notes: “The real question was whether we could build a relationship with customers outside the transaction. It had to be valuable enough on its own terms to change purchasing and engagement behaviour, without us buying that behaviour with discount.”

Building support across the business

Internally, LeMieux framed the Insiders project around three objectives that every function could understand – a better shopping experience; engagement beyond purchasing; and loyalty driven by levers other than discounts or product drops.

“We never presented it as a community project, or a loyalty programme,” says Loughlin. “Marketing, trading, ops, product and customer service could all see themselves in it.”

A staff beta test in September 2025 proved decisive. Rather than simply showing colleagues the app, LeMieux gave a locked-down version to employees across the business and asked them to use it like customers: browsing, posting, earning points and redeeming rewards.

“This bought everyone into the project,” Loughlin says. “It also gave us the bug and UX backlog that shaped the final six weeks before launch.”

Written reward principles, including no earn-and-burn discounting and no route to the top tiers through soft actions alone, helped reassure trading and finance that engagement would not be funded out of margin.

Making three platforms feel like one product

Delivering the Store, Rewards and Community ecosystem in under a year meant solving three big problems at once: technology integration, reward economics and operating model design.

The first was making the store on Adobe Commerce, loyalty engine on Antavo and community network on Invision Community behave as a single customer experience. “Customers should never see the seams,” says Loughlin. “A member’s tier must mean the same thing and be visible in all three places.”

That integration became the bulk of the engineering effort, alongside wrapping the experience as a progressive web application and securing app store approval. “To my knowledge no one had done this before with the combination of platforms chosen, so it was very much trial and error,” he adds.

The second challenge was creating rewards that felt generous without becoming discounts. LeMieux modelled the cost to the business against the value to the customer for every benefit, then repeated the process across the UK, US and rest of world because shipping economics changed the equation.

Commercial impact

For the wider business, the launch quickly became difficult to ignore. LeMieux Insiders reached the top 20 shopping apps in the UK and held its ranking for five weeks.

“For a niche equestrian brand that’s a bit nuts,” Loughlin says. “I have a screenshot for the ages of us nestled in position 20, just behind eBay, M&S and Etsy.”

The strongest commercial signal, however, has been retention and value. Among customers placing their first order in the launch month, app-first customers have delivered double the 90-day retention of website customers, with lifetime value tracking around 50 per cent higher so far.

The app now generates roughly a quarter of revenue from about 4 per cent of users, with revenue per user four times higher than desktop and eight times higher than mobile web.

Loughlin is careful not to overclaim causation, noting that highly engaged customers were naturally among the first to adopt the app. But he says the overall data points to a deeper behavioural shift.

“Our overall 90-day rolling retention rate jumped 18 per cent, and the engagement levels have persisted,” he says. “App users average 9.2 sessions each against 2.3 on mobile web. I think that shows a different relationship dynamic, not just a better-converting checkout.”

What comes next

The results have shifted the business towards app-first thinking. LeMieux’s Spring Summer launch took 40 per cent of day-one revenue through Insiders, while Black Friday early access on the app generated more revenue than the launch of Black Friday promotions on desktop and mobile web.

The next phase will focus on scaling the ecosystem around user demand. LeMieux plans to open a version of Insiders to desktop and mobile web so anyone can browse the community, while keeping participation inside the app.

“I feel it’s important to keep the experience tied into the phone app,” says Loughlin.

The brand will also hand more of the community to its most active members, promoting super users to moderators and allowing members to create their own groups. The aim is to let discipline-specific and regional communities grow without LeMieux having to run each one centrally.

More engagement mechanics are also planned, including expanded missions, QR scans at live events and stockists, more gamification, horse management functionality, an expanded outfit builder and a LeMieux resale marketplace.

For Loughlin, the logic is simple: if LeMieux can give customers more reasons to spend time inside its own ecosystem, loyalty becomes less dependent on promotions and more connected to the passion that brought those customers to the brand in the first place.

“This is going to take another 12 months to deliver,” he says, “but I’m excited about these initiatives.”

LeMeiux joins McDonalds, Ann Summers, B&Q, Currys, AllSaints and many more in the Digital Initiative of the Year category at this year’s RG Excellence Awards. See the full shortlist, and all categories here. This year’s awards will be hosted at the Underglobe on 14 October 2026. 

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