Tip Top Tailors is rolling out the latest wrinkle in its repositioning strategy: a new loyalty card program that targets big spenders with twice-a-year payouts of accumulated benefits.

Called Tip Top Advantage Rewards, the program has been under development for about a year, with in-store salespeople collecting names at the checkout counter of anyone making a significant purchase, usually a suit. Up to now, Tip Top used the list to execute periodic mailouts featuring special offers and promotions. Now the company says it has the back-office system in place for a formal program.

‘We looked at shared programs like Air Miles and proprietary programs,’ says Steven Ince, vice-president of marketing for Tip Top. ‘We decided to go with a proprietary program because of the control and access that gives us over the information.’

Advantage is based largely on Dylex sister-company Braemar’s Star Select loyalty offering, allowing Tip Top to capitalize on existing technology investments as well as Braemar’s practical experience with its two-year-old program.

Launched quietly at the beginning of September in a national custom mailing to about 100,000 Tip Top customers, the program is ‘absolutely measurable’ on a day-by-day, transaction-by-transaction basis, says Bob Froese, executive vice-president at Tip Top’s aor, The Brainstorm Group of Toronto.

‘We wanted to understand individual customer behavior. Despite being perceived as a suit specialist, Tip Top sells a variety of apparel, and there was a need to understand, with the movement towards casual, where the opportunities were. We wanted to find out what customers were buying: when, how, etc. The Advantage program is very much structured to track purchases by category and capture all that detail.’

Advantage members earn one point for every pre-tax dollar spent. Once they’ve accumulated at least 250 points, members wait for one of two gift certificate mailouts each year.

If they’ve accumulated between 250-999 points in one of two six-month ‘seasons’, they get a gift certificate worth 5% of that point value (that is, 500 points will get you a certificate worth $25, and so on). Point totals of between 1,000 and 1,999 earn 7.5%, and big spenders who bank 2,000 points or more get 10% of that back.

Point totals, however, are only summed between Aug. 1 and Jan. 31, or between Feb. 1 and July 31. To encourage frequency, point totals do not carry forward from one season to the next, so gift certificates are issued only on the points accumulated within one, not both, of the pre-set seasons.

Members get advance notice of sales and special events, private sale days, and exclusive invitations to in-store events, plus complimentary services like no-charge hemming, priority alterations, a zippered garment bag with any suit or jacket purchase and after-sales service for the life of each garment: button sewing, hem fixing, what-have-you.

Froese says that, as of Sept. 30, between 10-12% of Tip Top’s sales were directly attributable to Advantage Reward members.

‘You have to ask the question: Is that (10-12%) new business or customers that would have come anyway? We will know that eventually, but in the last two weeks, Tip Top’s sales have been up about 20% over same-store sales last year, and much more advanced than they have been over the last 10 months. So certainly the signals are there.’