Coworking with Christine Loh

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Christine Loh is chief product officer at AfterShip, an AI-powered post-purchase platform used by brands like E.l.f. Beauty, Away, and Gymshark.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? You know that moment after you click “buy,” when you’re refreshing the tracking page and wondering if your package is lost? My team builds the software that makes that part go right. That covers tracking, returns, exchanges, and fixing problems before you ever notice them. As Chief Product Officer, I decide what we build next. I spend most of my time with the brands that use us, figuring out where their teams lose hours and how we can give them that time back to repurpose for creating value.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? Some of the most useful hours I spend are observing how our customers actually do their work. On one customer visit this year, a rep walked us through a single return that took seven minutes because she had to jump between three different systems. No dashboard view would have shown me that. You have to sit next to someone and actively listen to the customer’s pain points.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Launching AfterShip Agent this year. For 14 years, AfterShip has been building up data on how the world actually ships and returns things. The agent puts that data to work. It spots shipment problems early, drafts the fix, and waits for a real person to approve it. Dr. Squatch cut the time it takes to resolve those issues by more than 58%. What I’m proudest of is how we built it: every recommendation explains its reasoning, and nothing that touches a customer or money happens without a human signing off. In the world of post-purchase, trust has to be earned, not assumed.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? Agentic commerce, though maybe not for the reason most people expect. Everyone is focused on AI agents finding products and checking out for shoppers. But if an agent handles the buying, the brand loses most of its chance to make an impression before the sale. What it still fully owns is everything after the order: the delivery, the update when something goes wrong, the easy exchange. I think that makes post-purchase the place where brands earn loyalty. That’s a big shift for a part of retail that’s long been treated as a cost center.

What’s your go-to coffee order? Oat milk latte with salted caramel.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? “Always make the data-driven decision.” I’m a big believer in data, but data only tells you about the world that already exists. Early in my career at a large brick-and-mortar retailer, it was hard to get the store teams to care about the website, because online was a tiny slice of revenue. The numbers were right. What they missed was that shoppers had started researching online before walking into a store, so the website was creating far more value for the company than its own revenue line showed. Since then, whenever a decision rests on “The data says…,’ I ask a second question: What value does this create for the whole business, and what trend does the data not see yet?

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? At 15, it had to be the Sony Walkman. Now, I can’t live without noise cancelling Airpods. They allow me to multi-task (exercise and work calls at the same time), and I never get on a plane without them (drown out noise for sleeping and entertainment).