# The Handsome Discount > A discount is usually treated as a giveaway, but done right it is a mechanism that points the member's interest and the company's in the same direction. Published: 2020-05-19 · Updated: 2026-06-29 · Topics: Digital Marketing, Subscription, Performance Marketing, DTC Strategy · Author: Alan Wizemann For most of my career I have watched companies treat a discount as a wound they choose to inflict on themselves, a deliberate cut to margin offered up in exchange for a sale they were afraid they would otherwise lose. That framing is so common that we stop noticing it. But it is worth saying plainly: in the default way of thinking, every dollar you discount is a dollar you have surrendered, and the only question on the table is whether the sale you bought with it was worth the giving. When I owned member strategy and monetization at Dollar Shave Club, I came to believe the framing itself was the problem. It quietly assumes the member's interest and the company's interest are pulling in opposite directions, and that the discount is the ransom you pay to drag the two closer together for a moment. I do not think that is true, or at least I do not think it has to be. A discount, designed with any care at all, is not a giveaway. It is a mechanism, and the difference between those two words is most of the work. The mandate I was given was broad – grow revenue per member beyond the core razor subscription – and it sat underneath a larger reinvention we called "Full Service," which moved the company from a razor-only habit to multi-category replenishment (the same trust that put a razor in the box could, it turned out, put a great deal more in there). The strategic instinct was simple to state and hard to execute: reward members for adopting more of the catalog, and treat every routine touchpoint we already owned as a chance to grow lifetime value rather than merely defend it. The packaging, the cart, the account page, the box itself – these were not just operational surfaces, they were the actual marketing, because the member saw them every single month whether we said anything clever or not. The mechanic we built to do this was the one we called the "Handsome Discount," and the idea behind it is almost embarrassingly intuitive once you say it out loud. The discount grows as the member adds more to their box. Add a second product and you save a little; add a third and a fourth and the per-item discount climbs with you, so the member who builds the fuller basket is plainly, visibly rewarded for doing it. Put that way it sounds like a coupon with a fancier name. But the orientation is entirely different, because the member's interest (paying less per item) and the company's interest (a bigger, stickier basket carried by the same shipping and the same relationship we were already paying for) are no longer in tension. They point in the same direction. The member optimizing for their own benefit is, in the same motion, doing the thing that is best for us, and nobody has to be talked into anything. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like an idea that arrived fully formed and obviously correct, and that is not how any of it happened. We did not trust the mechanism because it was elegant on a whiteboard. We validated it experimentally first, which is to say we put the increasing-discount-per-add structure in front of real members against a control and watched what they actually did rather than what the theory said they should do. Members demonstrably bought more when the discount grew with the basket – the behavior was real, not assumed – and only after the math held up under that scrutiny did we ship it broadly. That sequence matters more than the mechanic itself, and it is the part I would most want a younger version of me to internalize, because the seductive thing about a clean idea is precisely how easy it is to believe before you have earned the right to. The results, kept deliberately general here, were the kind you want from a mechanism rather than a giveaway: the work lifted average order value and lifted lifetime value in ways that compounded, because a member who has built a fuller box around you is not just spending more today, they are more deeply woven into the habit and less likely to drift away tomorrow. That is the quiet thing a true mechanism does that a giveaway never can. A giveaway buys you a transaction and leaves the relationship exactly where it was, while a mechanism changes the shape of the relationship itself, so that the saving the member captures and the value we capture are two readings of the same event. So I have come to distrust the instinct to think of marketing as the thing you say and the discount as the price you pay to be heard. The marketing, in a subscription business at least, is not the ad and was never really the ad. It is the math of the relationship – the structure of incentives the member lives inside month after month – and the surfaces where that math becomes visible to them. Your job is to design that math so the member, simply by following their own interest, walks toward the outcome that is best for both of you, and then to prove the math is real with members before you let yourself believe it. Get that right and the discount stops being a wound you choose to inflict. It becomes the most honest sentence the company knows how to say, which is that we did better here precisely because you did. --- Canonical: https://alanwizemann.com/articles/the-handsome-discount