Adam Crichton
E-Commerce Executive
LinkedIn Profile
Spotlight on
Tiptree
Find out how Tiptree uses Grapevine Surveys to capture customer insight, inform product development, and keep their iconic range evolving with their customers.
Meet Tiptree
Tiptree is one of Britain's most cherished food brands. Made by Wilkin & Sons in the heart of rural Essex, their preserves, marmalades, and condiments have been a fixture on breakfast tables, in hotel dining rooms, and on supermarket shelves for over 140 years.
The story starts in 1885, when Arthur Charles Wilkin began turning fruit grown on his Tiptree farm into jam. What began as a small village enterprise quickly grew into something much bigger. Today, the company still grows its own fruit on over 650 acres of Essex farmland, including strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, Morello cherries, and the famous Little Scarlet strawberry, which is grown exclusively on the Tiptree estate.
Everything is made to cherished recipes in small batches using traditional copper-bottomed pans. The fruit is inspected and prepared by hand. There are no artificial colours or flavours. It is this commitment to quality and craft that has earned Tiptree a Royal Warrant as purveyors to His Majesty King Charles III, a distinction the brand has held in one form or another since 1911.
Beyond preserves, the Tiptree family now includes nut butters, curds, chutneys, sauces, fine English spirits and liqueurs, and even Christmas puddings through Cole's Puddings. They operate a chain of quintessentially English tea rooms across Essex, and their products can be found in over seventy countries worldwide. Every member of staff is part of the company's share ownership scheme, giving each person a stake in the future of the business.
The Opportunity
Tiptree products reach customers through a wide range of channels. You will find them in supermarkets, farm shops, delis, hotels, cafes, and fine food stores around the world. That breadth of distribution has been central to the brand's growth, but it also means the team has traditionally had limited visibility into who their customers are and what they think.
Their Shopify store changes that. Selling direct to customers online gives Tiptree something those other channels simply cannot offer: a direct conversation with the people who buy their products. Every order is an opportunity to learn something new about what customers value, how they discovered the brand, and what they would like to see next.
With increasing brand awareness a key focus for the team, that direct line to customers is especially valuable. Understanding which channels are driving discovery helps the team make smarter decisions about where to invest. And beyond attribution, there is a chance to hear directly from customers about the products themselves, what they love, what they miss, and what they think the range might be missing.
The team wanted to make the most of that by capturing structured customer feedback at the point of purchase. Not to replace the expertise and instinct that has guided Tiptree's product decisions for decades, but to add another voice to the conversation: the customer's. The insight would sit alongside the team's own research and development thinking, helping to validate ideas, surface new opportunities, and keep the brand closely connected to the people who enjoy its products.
The Solution
Tiptree implemented a post-purchase survey using Grapevine Surveys, delivered on the Shopify post-purchase page so that every customer has the chance to share their thoughts immediately after placing an order. The timing is deliberate. Customers are engaged, the experience is fresh, and completing the survey takes just a couple of minutes.
We have always been a brand that puts our customers first, and we wanted a way to hear from them directly. Grapevine made it really straightforward to set that up. The survey sits right on the post-purchase page, it looks and feels like part of the Tiptree experience, and we get genuine, useful feedback from every order. It was important to us that the surveys felt natural and on-brand, not like an afterthought. At just $25 a month with unlimited responses, it was a straightforward decision.
Our focus is on our two core pillars, jams and chutneys, and making sure the product offering across those ranges is as strong as it can possibly be. The insight we capture through the survey helps us listen to our customers, refine what we already make, and develop new ideas within that space. We have been really deliberate about how we structure the questions too. We ask about discontinued products first, so customers can tell us what they would like to see come back. Then we ask about completely new product ideas. That way we capture the nostalgia answers separately and give ourselves the best chance of hearing something genuinely new.
The response from customers has been remarkable. Over 80% of customers complete the survey after placing an order, a figure that speaks to just how invested Tiptree's customers are in the brand and its future. That level of engagement gives the team a rich and reliable stream of insight to work with.
What data are you collecting?
We run a detailed post-purchase survey that covers several different areas. Each question is designed to give us a clearer picture of who our customers are, what matters to them, and where we should be focusing our attention. Here is what we are collecting.
Attribution Data
We ask customers how they first heard about Tiptree. Because our brand reaches people through so many different touchpoints, from supermarkets and farm shops to social media and word of mouth, understanding that first moment of discovery is really valuable. It helps us understand which channels are introducing new customers to the brand and where our marketing efforts are having the most impact. This is a classic attribution survey question, and the responses give us a much clearer picture than analytics alone.
Purchase Behaviour
We want to understand whether someone is buying from us for the first time or whether they are a returning customer. We also ask what they have already tried, whether that is buying Tiptree online or picking it up in a store. This helps us understand the journey customers take before they reach our Shopify store and how their relationship with the brand has developed over time.
Purchase Motivations
We ask customers which aspects of their order were most important to them. The options include things like product quality, the fact that Tiptree is a British brand, cherished recipes, gift options, delivery speed, website ease of use, and the fact that we grow fruit on our own farm. Understanding what drives a purchase decision helps us make sure we are communicating the right things and delivering on the promises that matter most to our customers.
Product Development
We ask customers which previously discontinued products they would most like to see return, and in a separate question, which completely new product ideas interest them most. We also ask whether they would be interested in larger jar sizes across different categories. These questions give us structured, quantifiable insight that we can take directly into conversations about strengthening the core range. You can find more inspiration for these kinds of questions in Grapevine's post-purchase question ideas.
How Customer Feedback Shapes What We Make Next
Our focus is on making sure our core range is as strong as it can possibly be. Jams and chutneys are what Tiptree is known for, and those two pillars are where we want to keep getting better. The survey helps us do that by giving us a structured way to hear what customers think about the range as it stands and where they see room for something new.
None of this replaces the team's own expertise and instinct. Our product development has always been guided by people who deeply understand preserves, fruit, and flavour. What the survey data does is add another dimension to those conversations. It gives us confidence that the ideas we are exploring have genuine customer demand behind them, and it occasionally surfaces preferences we might not have anticipated.
"Grapevine has given us a really clean, simple way to hear directly from our customers after every order. The insight we get feeds straight into real conversations about what we make, what we bring back, and where we go next. It has become an essential part of how we develop our range."
Strengthening the Core Range
The survey gives us a clear picture of where customers see opportunity within the range. When we are exploring new ideas, whether that is Chilli Jam, Banana Jam, or a new mustard, we can gauge genuine interest before committing to development. When we are thinking about introducing larger jar sizes across categories like marmalades, curds, or chutneys, we can see exactly which formats customers want. And when customers tell us what they miss from the range, that helps us understand where demand sits and how tastes are evolving.
We also know from the purchase motivations data what matters most to our customers when they buy from us. Product quality, the fact that we are a British brand, our cherished recipes, the fact that we grow fruit on our own farm. That insight helps us make sure our brand messaging and marketing strategy align with our customer’s expectations.
The result is a core range that keeps getting stronger, shaped by both heritage and customer insight. We continue to make the conserves and marmalades that have defined Tiptree for generations, while refining and expanding in ways that reflect what our customers actually want.
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