“Matter helps our employees feel more valued, rewarded, and recognized. It’s a very fun and easy-to-use platform that has created a positive experience and engagement for our people while also helping to reinforce our core values daily.”
Company: True Classic launched in late 2019 and has grown to become one of the hottest direct-to-consumer men’s apparel brands in the market, continuing to experience rapid growth despite changes to digital advertising and the macroeconomic environment. Their purpose is to empower everyone to look good and feel good.
Guided by a set of core values that they embody, they chart their path to success: "Move the Needle" as they focus on measurable impact, "Go Fast" through agile innovation, "Execute Like a Pro" with a commitment to excellence, "Be Creative" to solve challenges, and "Lead with Empathy" by prioritizing their employees, partners, and customers.
Industry: Retail Apparel and Fashion
Employees: 100+
Headquarters: Calabasas, California 🇺🇲
Key Use Cases: Feedback Friday, Kudos, Custom Kudos, Rewards, Celebrations, Analytics
Interview: Taylor Rapp – Director of People & Culture
When searching for a recognition and reward platform, True Classic had three main focuses:
Expanding further on these focuses, True Classic had just rolled out its set of core values, and they were determined to make them stick. As Taylor mentioned, “What we initially loved with Matter is that we could tie recognition to our core values with kudos, and reinforce them with Feedback Friday.”
Being a fun and remote workplace, it was important for True Classic to have a recognition platform that matched their culture and grew with their organization. Taylor talked about, “The second focus is, of course, employee recognition, something that's really important to us as a company. To cultivate this recognition, it was really important to find a fun and unique way to do this, and Matter provided that solution with kudos.”
Transparency is extremely important for the True Classic culture. Taylor shared, “Not only did we want to celebrate big wins as an organization, but we really wanted employees to have the visibility and insight to be able to celebrate the small wins of other teams as well.”
While True Classic had tried a shoutout Slack channel in the past, it was nothing as comprehensive as Matter.
From Feedback Friday and kudos to celebrations, analytics, and rewards, True Classic takes advantage of all of Matter’s Pro features. When asked about her favorite feature(s), Taylor emphasizes, “I love kudos and Feedback Friday! It's exciting to see all of the participation that we have. Having that transparency into what's going on across teams and the excitement in the channel has been game-changing!”
Every quarter True Classic has an all-hands meeting, and during the meeting, they create a slide that highlights and reinforces the impact of employee recognition and rewards. Taylor points out, “In the slide, we include the top kudos receiver for each core value, along with some kudos quotes, and then we have the high-level slide with stats/analytics from the platform.”
From memory, Taylor recalls that the setup and rollout were really smooth, “We introduced it at an all-hands meeting, mentioned we’d be using Matter, and the next day we turned it on, and it really became a big hit! And now, each quarter, as a company, we’re sending thousands of kudos and hundreds of thousands of coins.”
Being a data-driven company, the biggest delight for Taylor was the analytics feature. Taylor explains, “Something that’s really important is the ability to pull reports around the impact that Matter is having. With the analytics dashboard and report, I’m very easily able to pull meaningful insight for the all-hands meetings.”
As a growing company, it’s been important for Taylor and the True Classic organization to scale their culture as their headcount increases. An important problem that Matter solved for True Classic and Taylor was automation. More specifically, Taylor says, “The gift card checkout process is awesome! It’s super simple, and we don’t need to do anything from an admin perspective. Plus, it supports all of our rewards needs for our global team members too.”
Before Matter, Taylor was also manually sending birthday and work anniversary shoutouts in a Slack channel. With Matter, the platform automatically sends out messages to celebrate those special days and gift people with coins for their celebrations. Something unique that Taylor finds joy in is, “It's really cool to hear what people are using their Matter coins on. There are so many different options on the platform for employees to choose from!”
As for words of wisdom from Taylor, she recommends, “Of all the platforms I've used, Matter is the one that I recommend the most from a cultural standpoint because it's a really functional and comprehensive system. It's user-friendly and very functional, especially being tied to our core values and global rewards. We've had a really great, positive experience and reaction from our employees with it too. I like that Matter is always releasing new features like the surveys, most valuable participant coin award, and much more.”
