Lantern Loyalty Startup Built by Headphone Site Operator

One audiophile retailer, fed up with paying higher and higher acquisition costs to platforms like Meta and Google, took his own retention headaches and made it into a product. Andrew Lissimore, a former director of a Toronto-based premium audio store, launched Lantern, the Shopify-native loyalty and accounts platform, seeking to convert browsers into repeat buyers and community dwellers. Now, what started as a solution for one store’s loyalty “why-haven’t-yous?” is becoming something merchants can plug in without a lot of complex engineering.

From Niche Pain to a Cohesive Product Vision for Loyalty

For a long time, Lissimore’s designers used to sew different loyalty programs — points apps, referral widgets, and stamp cards — into one quilt to stitch together a cohesive brand experience, before realizing they couldn’t get around user flows clashing with one another, overlapping data, and off-brand interfaces.

The friction wasn’t merely cosmetic; it was costing us conversions and muddying our attribution.

The solution, he concluded, was a single system that felt native to Shopify’s admin and storefronts.

He put together a team of two veterans who had developed Shopify’s Polaris design system and recruited them from there: Kyle Peatt and Dominic McPhee. They became co-founders, with Peatt heading up design and product, and McPhee in charge of technology. Lantern is still small, with a team of eight, but the mission is huge: build loyalty, accounts, and referrals that feel like native parts that Shopify wants to include by default instead of pop-up windows duct-taped over the interface.

A Shopify-first retention approach for loyalty and accounts

Lantern integrates customer accounts, loyalty, and referrals into one merchant dashboard. Very simply, stores can reward transactions, social sharing, forum participation, and other brand actions they value… and then make account balances and rewards accessible directly in checkout. The experience is made to appear inline — no redirects, modals, or code snippets necessary — so shoppers can see value without breaking their flow.

It is also focused on brand continuity. Built with design primitives that echo Shopify’s own patterns, Lantern allows merchants to personalize interfaces without falling behind on performance and ensures a consistent customer journey across product pages, cart, and checkout.

Results merchants can measure from integrated loyalty

Lantern’s pilot run inside Lissimore’s store was a live iteration laboratory. Post-rollout, the repeat purchase rate rose among returning visitors from about 30% to 50%, and the average time to second purchase dropped from 198 days to 98. In addition, those increases are in line with wider research: Bain & Company has stated that a modest lift in retention can up profitability, while Shopify’s commerce analyses have demonstrated that returning customers convert higher and spend more per order than first-time buyers.

Lantern now has brands beyond audio on its roster, including Counter (a seller of skincare that brings in hundreds of millions in annual sales) and Vessi (a footwear label). It has built reporting for revenue attribution to loyalty actions, pulling in data by cohort, reward redemption activity, and repeat-order velocity into dashboards that merchants can rely on.

Funding and the competitive landscape for loyalty platforms

Lantern raised $3.1 million in seed funding from Salesforce Ventures, which led the round, and Sidekick Partners, Day One Ventures, as well as individual investors such as Vessi’s Tony Yu. “We wanted to provide a complete wallet in whatever channel the customer is shopping,” said Rob Keith, partner at Salesforce Ventures, citing how he liked that the platform extended beyond basic points gathering but also placed a payment option into checkout. He also pointed to the team’s combination of merchant and platform DNA as a major point of differentiation.

The market is not empty. You’ve also got incumbents like LoyaltyLion and Yotpo with sprawling footprints and vast war chests. Lantern’s gamble is that a deeply Shopify-native integration, cleaner UX, and flexible rewards logic will pull merchants tired of heavy customizations and disjointed data pipelines.

Why retention matters now for direct-to-consumer brands

The cost of customer acquisition is still rising on the big ad platforms, pressuring margins for direct-to-consumer companies. Adobe’s Digital Index and other commerce analysts have reported that repeat customers — who account for just a minority of site visitors — typically provide an outsize share of sales and higher lifetime value. In that kind of environment, loyalty isn’t a nice-to-have — it is a lever that builds over time when anchored to accounts, identity, and checkout.

Lantern’s philosophy reflects that change: show rewards where desire is strongest, incentivize earned perks with a little community participation, and lighten the cognitive load of always remembering codes and sifting through links. The shorter the path to repeat purchase, the more likely a customer will use that CRO on your site.

What Lantern does from here to scale retention features

The vision places intelligence and automation at the core. Lantern is building an AI-based recommendation engine to assist merchants in spotting at-risk cohorts, predicting lifetime value, and deploying the most appropriate discount at the right time. Anticipate deeper integrations with reviews, post-purchase surveys, and support platforms so retention signals can flow back into product and merchandising decisions.

For Lissimore, the thesis is more pragmatic: Solve the problems he faced as a merchant — many integrations, off-brand loyalty widgets, fuzzy attribution — and create a system that makes retention measurable and built inside of Shopify. If the early numbers hold, Lantern’s origin story may serve as a blueprint for founder-led tools forged in the trenches of modern commerce.