How John’s Crazy Socks Built A 92 NPS With Handwritten Notes

Most e-commerce brands spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to get customers to place their first order. Not many spend the same amount of energy thinking about what happens after the purchase.

 From the very beginning, John’s Crazy Socks’ co-founders John Cronin and his father Mark believed that every customer deserved a personal thank-you. So they included a handwritten note in every order they shipped. Every order, every time.

Over the years, that simple gesture became part of the company’s identity. As the business grew to more than 475,000 orders shipped across 89 countries, the handwritten note remained.

The result was one of the most loyal customer bases in ecommerce, including a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 92, more than 29,000 customer reviews, and more than $4 million in sales within the company’s first 22 months.

If you want to build the kind of loyalty John’s Crazy Socks is known for, Scribe can help you send handwritten notes consistently at scale. Contact Scribe today to get started and receive 200 letters free.

Why Every Order Includes A Handwritten Thank You Note

When John’s Crazy Socks launched in December 2016, John and Mark made a decision that most e-commerce operators would immediately flag as unscalable. Every order included a handwritten thank-you note from John, a few Hershey’s Kisses, and a packing slip naming the warehouse employee who packed the box. Military customers received an additional handwritten card thanking them for their service. 

Most businesses naturally shed what doesn’t scale. When a practice starts feeling expensive, time-consuming, or difficult to coordinate across a growing team, it gets cut or systematized into something more efficient and less personal. John’s Crazy Socks instead found ways to maintain the practice even as the volume grew into the hundreds of thousands.

By the time the brand had reached 475,000 packages shipped across 89 countries, a customer in Australia and a customer in Ohio were getting the same experience that felt like their order came from someone who was glad they were a customer.

How A Thank You Note Helped Build A 92 NPS

The brand launched in December 2016 with $14,700 in first-month revenue. By March 2017, that number had climbed to $350,000. By the 22-month mark, the brand had passed $4 million in total sales, donated roughly $170,000 to charity, and done all of it without running paid advertising.

But the most important is the Net Promoter Score which sits at 92 for John’s Crazy Socks.

NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend a brand to someone else. The retail industry average sits around 35. A score above 70 is considered world-class. Getting to 92 does not happen because of a product alone and depends on customers feeling something every time they interact with a brand. It also has to be a consistently positive experience that turns them into brand advocates. 

Shopify later highlighted the handwritten note program as one factor contributing to the brand’s strong customer retention and rise in recurring orders, alongside the company’s broader culture of treating customers like people rather than transactions. 

Of more than 29,000 reviews across their site, 95% are five-star ratings. Customers who feel well-treated tell others about it. And they keep coming back.

How Consistent Thank You Notes Built Customer Loyalty  

A customer who gets a note with their first order and never again might feel a brief moment of warmth. A customer who receives a note with every order over years of purchases starts to understand that this is simply how the company operates. The gesture is no longer a surprise. It becomes a signal about what the brand values.

Instead of building a campaign that generated a spike in goodwill, this was John’s Crazy Socks’ standard that told every customer, regardless of how much they spent or how long they had been buying, that their order mattered to the people who packed it.

Research from the Journal of Interactive Marketing supports the idea that this kind of consistency compounds over time. A field experiment found that handwritten notes roughly doubled future customer spending, and the effect was strongest among customers who already had a relationship with the brand. Loyalty deepens loyalty. A consistent handwritten touchpoint reinforces the relationship at exactly the moments when customers are most receptive.

The same research found that adding a discount to the note actually canceled the effect. John’s Crazy Socks never did that. The note was just a thank you. No code, no upsell, no ask. That purity kept the gesture feeling genuine across hundreds of thousands of deliveries.

How To Scale Handwritten Notes As You Grow  

Plenty of e-commerce brands have tried something similar to what John’s Crazy Socks did. A founder gets excited about the idea of a personal touch, starts writing notes for the first hundred orders, and customers respond well. Then the order volume grows, and the notes quietly become harder to keep up with.

Eventually, the notes go out only for big orders, for new customers only, or just stop altogether. Nobody decides to end the program. It just becomes one of the things that no longer happens once there isn’t time for it.

The impressive thing is that John’s Crazy Socks kept doing it after the order volume made it genuinely hard, and that had a profound effect on their results and growth.

The difference between sending 50 handwritten notes a month and sending several thousand is a different kind of problem. Most businesses don’t build the process required, because building a process for something that feels like a “nice extra” is hard to justify when there are a dozen other priorities competing for the same time.

A handwritten note program that runs for three months and then quietly disappears rarely creates the long-term impact brands are hoping for. The value comes from turning the gesture into a consistent part of the customer experience.

Scribe was built specifically for the part of this story where the volume goes up, and the personal touch doesn’t go away. Using handwriting robots that write with real pens and real ink, Scribe produces notes that look and feel genuinely handwritten, and connects directly to platforms like Shopify, HubSpot, and Salesforce, so a note can go out automatically whenever it’s triggered, without anyone needing to remember to write it. A business sending 50 orders a month and a business sending 50,000 can run the exact same process. The note doesn’t become less personal as the business grows. It just becomes more consistent.

How to Make Handwritten Notes Part of Your Customer Experience

The lesson from John’s Crazy Socks is that picking a few meaningful moments and consistently following through on them builds the kind of loyalty that’s hard to manufacture any other way.

A few moments work especially well as starting points, like a customer’s first purchase, a subscription anniversary, a loyalty milestone like a fifth or tenth order, an unusually large purchase, or simply a thank you sent with nothing attached.

The specific moments matter less than the commitment to showing up for them every time. Scribe makes that decision easier to keep. With no minimum order quantities and direct integrations with platforms e-commerce brands already use, Scribe can automatically trigger handwritten notes for any of these moments, so the program that starts strong in month one still looks the same in month thirty.

Ready to make consistency part of your customer experience? Contact Scribe today to learn how handwritten notes can fit into your e-commerce strategy and get 200 letters free.