Robots With Pens: How Handwritten Notes Are Turning Shopify Customers Into Raving Fans

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1:33David Wachs:Links in the show notes too. I saw this machine handwriting postcards. The person working in the booth said, we automate handwritten cards. Yeah, so I started this company 11 years ago. We're now the largest provider of automated handwriting in the world. The reason I started is in 2025, only 12 % of people feel appreciated by brands. And then we said, okay, well, what would make you feel appreciated? And by and large, the answer was handwritten notes. David Wax is the founder and CEO of Handwritten, the world's largest provider of automated handwritten notes. He's revolutionizing how Shopify brands build loyalty using real penwritten cards powered by robots.

2:13David Wachs:So we have a snack box company. And when they screw up, they send a handwritten note and an additional box of snacks. And what they find is people that have that bad experience followed by the win back actually have higher lifetime value than those that were never screwed up in the first place. How authentic does the handwriting look?

2:38Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Shopify 1 % podcast. I'm really excited about today's episode because I think it was four years ago. So I was at SubSummit and I walked by this booth and I saw this machine that was handwriting postcards. And I walked up and I asked, I said, tell me more about this. And the person working in the booth said, oh, well, you know how you some people send emails and SMS and everything. Well, we automate handwritten cards. And I thought, well, this is just genius because I know the impact of what a handwritten note means to me when I get it. And I'm so excited to hear more about what this means to a customer specifically in the e-commerce space and maybe how that drives connection.

3:33because my guest today, he's the CEO of Handwritten, spelled H-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N, and actually read in a study of yours that customers today feel appreciated. Only 12 % of them feel appreciated. A couple of years ago, that was 18%. It's going down.

3:55David Wachs:Yep. Tell us, first of all, David, welcome to the show. Take a minute and brag about yourself. Tell us who you are. Tell us about your company. and I'm excited to get into today's topic. Yeah, so I'm Jay. Thank you so much. I'm David Wagg, CEO and the founder of Handwritten. You're right. H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N. Why? Because we love you. Yeah. So I started this company 11 years ago. We're now the largest provider of automated handwriting in the world, to my understanding, by a pretty large margin, I believe. But the reason I started is prior to this, I had a company that did text messaging and we'd send a million texts a day for Abercrombie and Fitch and Toys R Us, we'd send another million or whatever.

4:34David Wachs:And while that worked, I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I realized, gee, everybody's going to be overloaded with all this electronic communication, whether it's texts or Slack or Teams or Twitter or emails. You know, the average person gets about 135 emails in their business email box a day. And that's an old stat. I think it's way more now. and they spend a quarter of their time managing that. So, you know, people are just hitting delete as fast as they come in. Yeah. But when was the last time somebody thanked you for marketing to them? And that's what handwritten notes do. When somebody gets a handwritten note with an I or, you know, handwritten with an I or handwritten with a Y, not only do they open it, but they keep it and often put it on display and you might receive a thank you call.

5:24David Wachs:Thank you for sending them that thank you note or whatever you're sending them. That happens all the time because people really appreciate the fact, A, you're doing something different and B, you're trying to connect at that human level. And what handwritten notes do is they show a deeper investment in time and thoughtfulness than an email or a text would. And then they also just stand out because the average person gets like two to three handwritten notes a month versus 135, 150 emails a day. So the least used inbox is the one at the end of their driveway, right? So that's what we try to do. So it's that one-two punch of A, it gets noticed because it's not frequently used, and B, it gets kept and savored because it feels personal.

6:11David Wachs:And to your point on the 12%, yeah, we found that stat pretty staggering. So we've done a survey twice now of consumer sentiment towards their brands that they work with and how they like to be reached out to. And what they said is they only feel, in 2025, only 12 % of people feel appreciated by brands. That's down from 2022 when it was 18%. So it's dropped by a third. And then we said, well, what would you do if you do feel appreciated? And they said, well, we would buy more frequently, rate and review more, and refer to friends more. So all the good stuff, everything you want, they would do if they felt appreciated.

6:53David Wachs:And then we said, okay, well, emails, texts, printed brochures, handwritten notes, what would make you feel appreciated? And by and large, the answer was handwritten notes. So it's a relatively small lift. You know, a handwritten note isn't some gimmick expensive thing you got to ship them or do for them. It's a relatively small lift to make people feel appreciated. And that appreciation, you know, depending on the note, you don't want the note to be some spam crap. you want it to be a sincere note from you, that note can have outsized returns. So that's really what we do. And for all the Shopify listeners in the audience, we have a plugin for Shopify you can use.

7:35David Wachs:And if you'd like, we can get into that. But I'm here to really preach the better bit of handwritten with an I, not a Y. Well, I for sure want to get into how an app would work because I imagine, well, let's, okay, first of all, what kind of note can be sent? Is it like a postcard? Is it a letter? Are there different layouts? What does it look like? Yeah, great question. So we don't actually do postcards because for us, it kind of defeats the point. When you get a postcard, we get really hoity-toity about this stuff. We say there's an unboxing experience with a handwritten note. You get the card in an envelope.

8:15David Wachs:You wonder, why did Jay Myers write me? You take the time to open that note and read the inside. With a postcard, first of all, when it gets to your house, it's all banged up because it's gone through the mechanicals postcard system. B, it doesn't show really any investment. Postcards are super cheap. And then C, there's no unboxing experience. So even the address on the letter is handwritten? Yeah. Everything is handwritten. That's amazing. Yeah. So the envelope is handwritten. There's a real stamp on there. And if you're Canadian or you're shipping to Canada and you have a Canadian from and a Canadian to address, it's a Canadian stamp is on there.

8:58David Wachs:We have a partner in Canada to mail those. And yeah, it's and actually the envelope is one of the most important parts because handwritten envelopes get a three times greater open rate in print. Yeah. And just to clarify, it's not a printed handwritten font. It's a pen. It's actually a pen that's moved by a machine. So it is literally written. Yeah, it looks like it was written. And, you know, there's a lot of nuance we can get into there too. If you want to know about that technology, I'm happy to share it. We do letters. We don't recommend it. They're expensive because a letter is a lot of writing.

9:38David Wachs:You know, what are you really going to say to a client? You know, my dearest Gwendolyn, you know, it's only, you know, you're not going to write a whole letter to somebody. So we say short cards and a card, we do have kind of two sizes that we try to fit you in. One is, it really depends on the envelope more than anything. So a five by seven envelope, which is a large, typically flat card, and it could be portrait or landscape. So it could either be vertically oriented or horizontal. And then my favorite is an A2 folded card. So that's a little smaller. That's like this size. and then it opens up or it opens to the side.

10:19David Wachs:You can go to handwritten.com, create an account for free, design your own cards and we will operate a full print shop, printing press. So every card is printed. It's not like you printed it out on your home printer. It's a full bleed, thick stock custom card and it can either be vellum, which is kind of a toothy stock, good for stationary style, five by seven flat cards, or it could be a C1S, which is a glossier stock, good for saturated images. So if you're doing a full photo on the front of the card, I'd recommend the C1S. And that's what we do by default. But so yeah, it's a folded card or a flat card completely to your specs.

11:03David Wachs:And then once you've designed that card, you can actually plug in our Shopify app and then send it directly based on triggers in Shopify. So you could say, send this card to everybody on their first purchase and then design another card. Like you're a rockstar, send that card to everybody after they spend a certain amount of money. And then another one on anniversary purchase. And you can even do a band in shopping cart style cards. So I could send a handwritten note to someone when they don't complete a purchase. Yeah, I don't know how many people do it, but you certainly can. And you could even, if you've got kind of, you know, let's say you only have 10 products on your app, like maybe, or on your store, maybe you sell expensive saunas, you could actually design a abandoned shopping cart for each of those five, 10 saunas and send that separately.

11:58David Wachs:So, you know, we're so sorry, you decided not to purchase the sauna, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and send that out. So you could do the abandoned shopping cart. Most people are sending thank you for your purchase. The main use case for handwritten is not really strict marketing. It's long-term value of that client because everybody, I think, is so excited to grow their client base. And, you know, there's a lot of CRM dashboards around new sales and that type of thing. But there isn't as much razzmatazz around client retention. And there's a lot you can do to kind of fill, close up that leaky bucket on the bottom, you know, where not every client just falls through the bottom of the bucket.

12:47David Wachs:By making clients feel appreciated per our 2 ,000-person survey, we show that these clients can come back in again and again. So it's really about customer nurturing and sharing appreciation. because as Maya Angelou says, it's not what you do for somebody or sell somebody. It's how you make them feel and laugh what they remember. So if you can help them out there and try to appeal to their emotion, people buy on emotion and that's what we help them with. Amazing. I'm looking at the screen right here and seeing some of the triggers. Like my mind just spins. I was an e-commerce store owner since 1998.

13:25So when I see stuff like this, I start going, like my mind starts spinning. lifetime purchase threshold. That one seems like a no-brainer when someone has spent$500 or$1 ,000 to send a personal thank you. You've been a customer and you've spent so much and we just wanted to give you something. Here is a coupon for$50 off something like that on us. We appreciate your business. To me, that would be one of the first ones I would set up. What are what are the ones you see that work the best and i guess actually how do you track that is it

14:04David Wachs:through coupon codes that you track yeah so so we do have some clients using coupon codes we have a actually a canadian bespoke suit company out of vancouver so they'll send you know you provide your measurements or whatever and they'll go to china get a suit made and send it and what they do for their best clients every year around Christmas, they send them a special coupon code in a holiday card from the company, and they see a 17 % redemption rate on those coupons, which is by far their highest redemption rate. But to your point, usually we're out of the loop. People don't share with us the effectiveness.

14:45David Wachs:Why would they? We just raise their rates or so they'd think. We don't know. All we know is our clients see great responses from this because they keep using us year in, year out. Some other use cases that are kind of unrelated to the Shopify app, but available, you know, just using handwritten is Winbacks. So we have a snack box company that sends office snacks, you know, snacks to your office every two weeks to refill your your pantry. And when they screw up, you know, whether it's a late box or the wrong box or stuff gets damaged, what have you, they send a handwritten note and an additional box of snacks.

15:24David Wachs:And that handwritten note says, we're so sorry for this mistake. You know, please take this extra box of snacks. And what they find is people that have that win back, that the bad experience followed by the win back actually have higher lifetime value than those that were never screwed up with in the first place. And because of that, they then decided to just screw up with everybody, send everybody the win back and raise all boats. You know, it's a tremendously effective campaign for them. But yeah, I mean, for us, it's really anniversary of purchase. Thank you. And then, you know, we do Christmas and birthday cards, but a lot of that falls outside of the Shopify plugin.

16:08So funny. You mentioned that you'll screw up intentionally. I mean, we talked with our support team at bold and i always say that like when something goes wrong it's a golden opportunity because you never rave you never go to a store let's say it's a grocery store and just buy something check out pay and everything is just normal and rave about it but if something goes wrong and then i have this example i think i've mentioned it on the podcast before but i'll say it again but i there's a coffee shop up in here in canada called tim hortons i don't throw down

16:43David Wachs:on the of course i mean it should be on the canadian flag i think it's yeah it's synonymous with canada anyways i went through the drive-thru one time sorry it was i didn't go through that through my sister-in-law did and she ordered like three sandwiches and some drinks and stuff or some dinner got home opened up the bag and i think two of the sandwiches were missing and it was like going to be supper for the kids right and so she was upset because she's like oh Oh my gosh. And she tweeted something like, thanks, Tim Hortons. How can you like not even put the sandwiches in the bag? Now I got to drive back.

17:16You screwed up our dinner. Something along those lines. Well, Tim Hortons DMed her directly, messaged her, apologized and offered to drive the sandwiches to our house. And they drove this. They got someone to drive the sandwiches. And like to this day, like that was 15 years ago. I'm still talking about it. She's still talking about it. And it's like, had that not gone wrong, it would just been a regular order like every other one. So I do believe 100 % that when something goes wrong, correcting it is what customers remember. And if you can manufacture that in a way that is not overly bad, that they're leaving horrible reviews on the internet, but just enough that you can fix it.

17:59David Wachs:I totally agree. I was just talking about this on a podcast the other day. When somebody calls into customer service or goes to your chat bot or whatever, that is a double, that is that you're at two strikes right there. Two, not one. Because one, they had the bad experience, right? Like they went to, they're contacting you because they had a horrible experience. They need to fix it. Two, now you're inconveniencing them a second time. because now not only did they have the bad experience, but now they have to waste their time getting on your chat bot or calling your 800 number or whatever to fix it.

18:36David Wachs:And oftentimes if you're a bad company, they have to go through an IVR tree and get transferred 18 times and you have to re-explain it five, all that. So if you can walk away from that experience feeling heard, it is huge. Personally, same thing. I recently, this wasn't 15 years ago, but I recently bought a new barbecue island for a backyard. And there were a number of pieces and they had to be palleted in from some God holy knows where. And it took a few days for that to come. When they came, one of those pieces was damaged. It was all banged up. So I contacted barbecue guys, the company I bought it from, happy to mention them.

19:20David Wachs:And they said, okay, well, we're so sorry about that. We'll ship you a new part overnight. and then somehow, and I don't even know how they did it, they were able to get that overnight. And then, which is great and it was fine. And I said, well, what do I do with the other part? They said, just throw it away or give it to somebody. I was like, great, make it easy. And then two days later, they called me and they said, we just wanted to make sure you got your part, everything's okay, you're happy now. The fact that they called me to follow up, that I wasn't a transaction, that they have a customer for life, right?

19:53David Wachs:Like, it doesn't take much. It doesn't, it just doesn't take much. But once you do that, once you do that little extra step of following up to make sure people feel heard, it's like, wow, right? And it really gets back to that Maya Angelou quote. Yeah, I think customers, and I said this on the podcast a couple of days ago, I said, customer service is where you can really create those aha connections by turning a double strike out into a positive and it's not that hard you just have to you just have to care yeah and and if you know my my my sample here had nothing to do with a handwritten note it had to do with the phone call but if you're trying to scale it maybe handwritten notes and we had during covid a client of ours is a flat pack furniture seller so you know they assemble your soul furniture they ship it to you you put it together they have people calling into their call center and one person called in, they sent them a handwritten note, thanking them for calling in and hoping everything's okay.

20:55David Wachs:That person then called back crying. I think a lot of this is elevated due to COVID and people were especially solitary or isolated and that type of thing. But I think the emotion's still there today, five, almost six years later. It's not as heightened, but it's there. And if you can tap into that and make people feel heard, that's huge. wow what can you put in a letter is it can you put in like you could you put a picture of your team in there or like can you include things like that yeah i mean the card itself is fully customizable if i could get it on frame yeah it's fully customizable and you could customize the front you can customize the back and then on a card like this you could put something on the top on the back, you can put your logo or what have you.

21:48David Wachs:Our cards that we sell that aren't customized, say Red Wagon, because we don't want to say handwritten and ruin the mystery or whatever, give a little secret. You can also, on a folded card, you could put a QR code at the top. On a flat card, you could do it. And those QR codes are uniquely trackable. so if you have 500 people and you send it out to 500 and 20 of them 20 would be a lot for qr codes but if people actually scan it you know you have to have real good reason for people to scan yeah wait are they trackable per recipient person per person yeah so you create a recipient so if i send this card and it had a qr code to jay meyers and jay's wife or jay's kid or whoever's formed it But if you send 100 different ones, I can track which one was scanned.

22:46So you're creating 100 different URL redirects to the, yeah.

22:52David Wachs:Correct. Yeah, because the way we used to, we couldn't used to do this because, you know, when we place your order on our robots, we print out 500 of your, you know, if you did an order of 500, we just take a stack of 500 cards, stick them in the robot, and God forbid the robot screws up, we got to redo it. But now our system is so mature, we can individually track it all the way through the process. And so we're fully able to do that for you. And then we just provide a nice chart. Like I would imagine if I had a thank you note. So someone spends a certain amount, they order something and I say, we have an offer exclusive for you.

23:34It's not on our website. It's a hidden offer that's only available through this QR code. there's something about mystery like we know like one of our apps we do upselling and one of the upsell offers that convert the best is a mystery box where the customer doesn't know what they're getting but there's something about that mystery right like or scan we've prepared something we have a special offer for you scan to see what your offer is like the click through on that's got to

24:02David Wachs:be awesome yeah so you can absolutely do that and then you'd have the reporting on our end and the reporting on your end as far as, you know, it would just go through to whatever Shopify URL you want. That's all very easily doable. Amazing. What does it cost? If you go, so what I would not recommend is creating an account of handwritten, signing up on Shopify and paying through Shopify because Shopify requires us to allow you to buy through Shopify. It's just one of their marketplace terms, but then you're paying rack rate. Instead, if you go to handwritten.com, you can prepay for credits or buy a subscription, or now we have these things called business plans.

24:50David Wachs:It's a long answer to a short question, but at the very most, you're paying$3.75 a card plus postage. The very least you could be paying $1.49. It just depends on if you do a business plan or not. The business plans run, you can actually pay less than$1.49 if you do our elite plan. Just don't give that pricing out without talking to us. Do you have a way to track the cohort of customers who have received a handwritten note versus ones that haven't? That would be through you or through Klaviyo. That's kind of, we don't capture all your data like that right now. Right, so but in Shopify, could I?

25:36David Wachs:In Shopify you could, yeah. Right, so is there something, could it apply a tag to a customer or is there some way that I know that a customer has received? That's a great question. Currently, no, we don't apply a tag. However, I will put that on the short list because that should be very easy. We don't, our problem is we designed the Shopify plugin in a vacuum and we haven't received a lot of feedback, but yeah, we could absolutely apply a tag or if you use Klaviyo, you could use Klaviyo to trigger and written and then add the tag then as well. It would just be a Zapier attachment. Okay. Gotcha.

26:12Yeah. I'm going to play it. There's gotta be a way. What I'm getting at is I am willing to bet anything that if I ran a report on the cohort of customers that have gotten a handwritten note, their customer lifetime value would be higher than the ones that haven't yeah so sometimes sometimes with things like this like they might not buy directly that moment on the qr code right they might not but a month later when they need to buy something they'll feel that a little bit more connection and they might come back to the brand they sent them a handwritten note 100 i i mean it's