Gymboree Visa credit card review

Gymboree Visa introduction

As a father of four, I know that kids’ clothing can be a big expense. Any opportunity to reduce expenses is worth looking into. The marketing hook of the Gymboree Visa card is that it will help you to save money on clothing. But will it? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The Rewards

As stated on the card’s website, here are the rewards offered by the card (in italics), followed by my commentary.

• Save 20% on your first Gymboree clothing purchase! 20% sounds nice, but run the numbers. How much are you spending on your purchase? If you’re spending $100, that’s only $20 back. $20 may seem nice, and it is, but keep in mind that credit cards will almost always require a hard pull from a credit bureau that will ding your credit score by a few points. It’s not that big of a deal, but keep that in mind if you’ve got a car or mortgage application coming up. And also be aware that the $20 you get from this hard pull could be less than what you get from a different credit card sign-up. Some credit card sign-up bonuses can be worth hundreds of dollars.
• 5% Discount on all Gymboree, Gymboree.com & Gymboree Outlet purchases. 5% is not bad at all; it’s more or less a standard for a lot of retail credit cards. But your baseline for credit card rewards should be 2%, since there are no-fee 2% cards like the Citi Double Cash available to you. By that standard, your rewards here are 3% (5% minus 2%), not 5%.
• 1% Reward on all other purchases. This is a terrible level of rewards! You should never use your Gymboree Visa outside of Gymbroee. As I said, 2% cash back should be your baseline.
• Receive a $10 Gymboree Retail Store Enrollment Bonus after acceptance. I’ll repeat what I said above: $10 seems nice, but you have to look at it in relation to the cost of the hard pull from the credit bureau as well as the opportunity cost of other credit cards you could have received instead of this one.
• No Annual Fee. This ought to be a given for all but a few premium credit cards. I can’t think of any store cards that charge an annual fee, so no annual fee on this card is no big deal.

The bottom line

Should you get this card? For most of you, I would say no. If you’re a diehard Gymboree fan who’s going to spend thousands of dollars there regardless of whether or not you have the credit card (and you’re not paying interest on your purchases, of course), then you’d probably benefit from this one. Otherwise, forget this card. There are much better ones out there.