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I'm the Chef Too: Cooking up subscription success

• 16 June 2025
Last updated: 16 June 2025
Woodland Tree Stumps subscription box

Who is I'm the Chef Too?

I'm the Chef Too (ITCT) is a subscription box company located in the US that provides educational cooking adventures for children. The goal of ITCT is to teach children STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) through cooking. It is aimed at children (typically ages 4-14) and their grown-up sous chefs.

We worked with the team at ITCT to rebuild their subscription service and build a whole new website in Shopify to unlock their business growth.

What was their problem?

ITCT faced a number of challenges. Their biggest challenge was with their subscription service. They used a combination of WordPress, WooCommerce and Woo Subscriptions. They had been heavily customised over time however were unable to keep up with the rapid growth of their business.

The website was maintained by a freelance designer who was trying to manage the whole platform on their own. The WordPress setup and configuration had become an issue with numerous fulfilment problems and bugs. This ultimately created a poor customer experience for many. It also meant that ITCT couldn't sustainably scale their business like they wanted.

These factors severely limited the growth of ITCT, preventing them from fulfilling new orders, building a brand that could be trusted at first glance and having a website that could be easily updated according to the needs of a growing business.

Their needs

  • A complete review of what they needed to scale their business sustainably
  • Subscription service analysis to determine the best approach long term
  • New approach to their subscription model
  • Ability to grow and scale their business
  • A new customer support approach to handle the scaled needs

What we did

Digital review and strategy

After a thorough review of their issues and existing processes, we recommended a new technology platform based around:

  • Shopify Plus
  • Recharge Subscriptions
  • Gorgias

Shopify Plus made the most sense for ITCT to continue scaling their company without managing technology.

We also analysed how their subscriptions were handled. At the time, Shopify didn’t offer an out-of-the-box subscription option. After assessing all the options, we partnered with Recharge for a comprehensive solution that included a Shopify integration.

After completing an assessment process, we determined that Recharge Subscriptions would be the best solution to help them scale the business long term.

We found working in a different timezone to ITCT and on an almost opposite time schedule worked to our advantage. We could get something over to them for review by COB our time, allowing them to complete the review while we slept. 

In turn, we were able to update their changes while they slept. The actual migration happened outside of working hours for them but in ideal working hours for us.

For customer support, we implemented Gorgias, with its deep Shopify integration, to help streamline customer support. This included a knowledge base on the website for customer self-service and some automation of support tasks.

The challenges

We had to assess their current subscription solution and switch over to a new one while maintaining ITCT’s current subscriptions while still being able to add new subscribers.

In many ways, this was like trying to build a new rocket while it’s on the way to the moon. We didn't stop their advertising. So we had new subscribers continuing to come through while we were trying to fix the old site, building a brand new website and moving subscriptions over to a new platform. 

The other challenge was seamlessly porting customers over when they had a mix of payment processors that didn’t support porting of customer data.

The results

The biggest result was that the transition from the old website to the new website had minimal impact on customers.

Due to our changes to the site and their subscription platform, ITCT has been able to take on more customers and subscriptions. The business has been able to grow as their customer base grew dramatically too. Since the change, their subscriber base has increased by 3 times.

Conclusion

The Refuel team developed a strategy that unlocked the scalability of ICTA. That strategy worked with increases in subscriptions and with minimal disruptions to ICTA and their customers. 

We were able to help them take the pressure off their sole web designer and give ICTA multiple skillsets at their disposal to ultimately find and deliver the best result.

Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones

Ryan is the Founder & CEO of Refuel Creative. He's a HubSpot certified marketer and SEO expert.

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