Designing a membership that solved a delivery fee problem

How "The Round" turned an off-putting per-delivery charge into a compelling value proposition, increasing sign-ups, reducing churn, and giving customers a reason to stay beyond their regular order.

01 - The Problem

A delivery charge that was quietly killing conversions

When The Modern Milkman first launched, delivery was bundled, customers paid a single weekly fee regardless of how many deliveries they received. As the company scaled, the pricing model changed. From 2022, customers were charged per delivery. With up to three deliveries available per week, costs could stack up quickly.

The logic made sense from a revenue perspective. But the customer experience told a different story. Delivery charges started to feel expensive, particularly for new customers who hadn’t yet built a habit around the service. The more frequently someone ordered, the more they paid. The model was inadvertently penalising the behaviour the business most wanted to encourage.

"We were charging customers more for ordering more. That's the wrong incentive structure for a subscription business built on habit."

The challenge was real: how do you maintain sustainable delivery revenue while making the cost feel worthwhile, even exciting, for customers? The answer the team landed on was membership.

02 - Discovery

Understanding why customers were hesitating

The data pointed clearly at delivery cost as a barrier at sign-up and a reason to reduce order frequency among existing customers. New customer conversion was being affected, and the per-delivery model created a recurring friction point every time someone considered adding another delivery day.

The insight that shaped the solution was that customers weren’t just paying for milk to be dropped at the door. They were buying into a service, a community, and a set of values around sustainable, locally-sourced food. A membership model could reframe that relationship entirely, shifting the experience from transactional to something customers felt genuinely good about being part of.

Working alongside the product and brand teams, I helped explore what a membership proposition could look like, one that solved the delivery cost problem while also creating tangible, visible reasons to sign up and stay.

03 - Design

Two tiers, two touchpoints, one coherent experience

The membership, branded “The Round” by the business and brand team, needed to work in two places: as part of the sign-up journey for new customers, and within the account area so existing customers could join, upgrade, or cancel at any point.

Monthly - £8.95 / pm

Annually - £6.66 / pm - Billed annually at £79.95

The proposition needed to communicate two tiers clearly without overwhelming a new customer still deciding whether to subscribe at all. The design principle was immediacy, making the value feel real and tangible at the moment of decision, not hypothetical.

1. Sign-up integration

Membership was presented as an optional step during the sign-up flow, positioned where delivery preferences were set. The value was immediately obvious in context, removing the delivery charge concern at exactly the moment it would otherwise arise.

2. Account area

Existing customers needed to join, switch tiers, or cancel without friction. A dedicated membership hub within the account section showed current status, upcoming benefits, and a clear path to manage or upgrade the subscription.

Members’ Week, a rotating week each month with up to 40% off a curated product range, was a key design decision. It gave members a recurring reason to check the app, creating a habit loop beyond the passive benefit of free delivery.

04 - Constraints & Trade-offs

Phased rollout, not a big bang

The Round launched in specific areas in 2025 before expanding more broadly. This phased approach was deliberate, it allowed the team to test the proposition with a real subset of customers, gather data on take-up and behaviour, and refine before scaling.

As with every product I worked on at The Modern Milkman, the push was to ship something testable rather than wait for complete. The membership space had a lot of potential complexity, tier switching logic, gift fulfilment, prize draw mechanics, member-exclusive pricing, and keeping the MVP scope tight was essential to getting it live and learning quickly.

The membership was also a genuinely cross-functional product. Brand, product, development, and commercial teams all had stakes in the outcome. A significant part of the design work was making sure the experience stayed coherent across every touchpoint as different teams contributed different parts.

05 - Outcomes

Reframing cost as belonging

The Round changed the conversation around delivery fees. Rather than a variable per-delivery cost that grew with usage, customers could invest in a flat membership that made more deliveries more affordable, and came with tangible, visible rewards alongside it.

Delivery cost reframed

A recurring friction point at sign-up became a selling point. Free unlimited delivery as a membership perk landed differently to a charge being removed, the framing shifted the perception entirely.

A reason to return

Welcome gifts, Members' Week, and monthly prize draws created ongoing reasons for customers to engage with the service beyond their regular order. Membership gave the relationship texture beyond the transaction.

Richer behavioural data

Members interacting with offers, gift selections, and prize draws provided significantly more behavioural data than passive subscribers, informing product ranging, campaign timing, and retention strategy.

A foundation to build on

The phased rollout gave the team real usage data to inform the next iteration, which benefits drove sign-ups, which tier customers preferred, and where the flow had friction worth fixing.

06 - Reflections

What I took away from this project

Pricing problems are often experience problems in disguise. The delivery charge wasn't just expensive, it felt transactional. Membership reframed the same cost as belonging to something.
When working across a product with multiple contributors, brand, development, product, the design challenge shifts. It's less about originating ideas and more about making the experience coherent across every touchpoint.
Phased rollouts are underrated. Launching in select areas first gave the team permission to learn before committing to the full proposition at scale.
The most effective membership designs make the value feel immediate, welcome gifts and first-month benefits do more work than long-term promises at the point of sign-up.
An MVP mindset on a revenue-generating product requires more careful stakeholder management. The pressure to launch something polished is higher when money is involved, making the case for iteration over perfection matters more.