032: How to Find Products for Your Subscription Box?

So you've been thinking about a subscription box, but maybe you're unsure where to buy products for your box. Maybe you just need some new resources because you've exhausted the ones you're already using. On this episode, I've got lots of different ways to find products for your subscription box. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Hey everybody, it's so good to be back on the podcast this week. And this week we're talking about how to find products for your subscription box. And I, I want you to know that if you are new in your subscription box journey, that we're having struggles, like we're having struggles finding product, getting product on time. The transportation situation with products right now is just a hot mess. And if, if you've not been around before, let's say March of 2020, it feels heavy and it feels hard. But I want you to know that it wasn't always like what we're dealing with right now. And I have a lot of hope that we're going to get through this and things are going to go back to the way they were. I mean, things ran like clockwork before. You ordered product by this date, product showed up at your door. You packed your subscription boxes and you went on your merry way. And if you've been doing your subscription box for any length of time right now, that's just not how easy it is right now. I mean, let's just be real. Let's be honest. Product has been, it's been on a struggle bus. I've been dealing with my own product issues, probably worse than I ever have this particular month. And it's hard. It's hard to communicate with your customers. With this stuff, but you have to keep going because it's worth it. You figure it out, you work through the issues, and you just keep going. And that's what I keep telling myself, and that's what I keep telling everybody else, because I know it's not always going to be this hard to get product. And one thing that I want you to really understand out of our discussion today is how important it is to diversify where you're sourcing product. I'm going to give you several different ways to find products for your subscription box. And what I want you to learn is that think outside the box when you're thinking about buying product for your box, because if you have all of your eggs into one basket, meaning if you only use one vendor, if you only source one way and something happens with that vendor or that manufacturer or whoever it is that you're getting products from, you have no other options. And that's really what we've been dealing with over the last probably year at this point. Having accounts with other vendors, working with other vendors on a large scale the way I do, sourcing in different ways has really been the saving grace when I need product and I need product quickly. If you never have any other relationships Getting product when you're in a bind is, is stressful. And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to source product lots of different ways. And let's just dig into that. Let's just start talking about all the different ways that you can buy product for your subscription box. So the very first one is local. Buy local. And it's really easy to do this, especially in the beginning when you don't need bigger quantities. But anytime that you can buy products from another local business. And local means in your town, local might be in your state, but local in your area. If you can buy products from another business owner that is local to you, a lot of times it's just quick and easy and, and just really beneficial for you. I used a lot of local vendors when I first started out because they could make things for me, the quantity that I needed. They could create the colors, the themes that I needed for my box. I loved using local vendors. I still use local vendors, but what, what happens with local vendors, sometimes they can't scale with you. So as my box started to scale, it really limited how, how much they could produce for me. There are some local vendors that I use that have scaled right along with me, and it's amazing because not only am I creating recurring revenue in my own business, but I'm creating recurring revenue in someone else's business. Every single month I get to use one of my vendors to print for me, and they are there. It's guaranteed money for them as well. So buy local. I used local shops. Go talk to them, drop in their shop. Maybe they follow you. Maybe you've done like farmer markets or vendor, vendor fairs before. And so people that you know, reach out to them and you can buy products from other local businesses in your area. Another group kind of along that lines would be Facebook groups. There are a ton of wholesale Facebook groups for every industry. We're talking clothing, we're talking gifts, we're talking crafts. Like, there's a ton of Facebook wholesale groups. So I would encourage you to join some Facebook groups in your niche. So if I have a gift subscription, so I could really search for those. If I had, you know, a planner subscription box, You could go into some local groups and maybe there are some wholesale groups where people make things for planners. If you're talking about adding a candle to your subscription box, I'm sure there are wholesale candle groups. You can find wholesale groups all over Facebook. And really, the only thing that's required of you to join these groups is an email and a tax ID. Sometimes they want to see your website. They need to verify that you are a resale vendor, so they're going to check out your website. But you can find a lot of different wholesale vendors just on Facebook joining these Facebook groups. We have a really great resource inside Launch Your Box. So a lot of times the members of Launch Your Box, they make items for their own boxes. There are a lot of people that make their own items, but what they can also do is they make items for other subscription box owners. So we have a whole wholesale guide inside our Facebook group of subscription box owners that also provide wholesale items for other subscription box owners. So it's another great resource in our membership. Our third place that you can find products for your subscription box is, is just general wholesale. So you can find— if you know a brand that you want to use, so say I'm looking at my desk right now and I have a BIC pen, I could go over to the BIC website, I can maybe apply for a wholesale account with them. Them. You can do that with clothing, you can do that with home decor, you can do that with craft supplies. You can really do that in any single industry. Just search for the brand that you're looking for, see if they have a wholesale application or wholesale spot on their website, and you can submit your information. You can get approved, and then you can start shopping their wholesale site and adding stuff to your boxes. This is a great way to get started when you're early on. Another way to shop wholesale online is through wholesale sites. So these are sites dedicated just for wholesale vendors. So we're talking about places like Fair and Tundra, even Abound. They're kind of popping all over the place, and what's great about them is that a lot of small businesses And big brands sell their items on these wholesale sites, so you can apply to become a buyer. It's much like a filling out an application on someone's brand site to be a wholesaler. So you go on to fair.com, you can apply to be a buyer. Now there are some requirements, and I did a little bit of research before this podcast, and I went and looked at Tundra and Abound and Fair. It's not really crystal clear what their requirements are for you to be a buyer on their site. And you know, I think it's good, it's good and bad in both ways. It protects the sellers because they don't want just any random Joe buying products on their sites. But it also, it's hard when you're just starting out, maybe you don't have the credentials or the requirements that they want. Maybe you have to have references from other people that you've bought from, maybe you have to have sales of X amount of dollars. It's not really clear what their requirements are. They do want to see that you have either a physical location, an online presence, so you have a website where you're selling goods, or that you're consistently doing like pop-up shops and shows. If you do like traveling markets or you do Christmas events or farmers markets or things like that, they want to see proof that you are selling items that you have bought. So you've got to show proof of that. So if you're just starting out, that might be a little challenging. You might have to show some different credentials to get approved to be a buyer on one of the wholesale sites. But those sites have tons of different products in every niche, in every industry that you can start buying for in small batches for your subscription boxes. The fourth way that I have for you to find products for your subscription box would be to go to a market or a trade show. And these are big events, and I love to attend these. I attend these at least twice a year, every year. Sometimes I go 3 and 4 times a year. But what these big markets are is it's huge showrooms full of different vendors, and typically they're for specific industries. So the markets that I attend are called like the Total Home and Gift Markets. I sell gift items, I sell home items, I sell boutique items. And so I like to go to the gift shows. I like to go to apparel markets sometimes too. I sell t-shirts, I sell cardigans, I sell jewelry. So you can kind of find what market would fit your, your box, and you can attend these large markets or trade shows. And what happens is it's huge buildings, tons of floors, and hundreds hundreds of vendors on each floor. They're usually categorized by different categories, you know, of vendors, and you just start walking through the showrooms, looking at what they have to offer, and you can place your orders right there on the spot at market. It allows you to connect with that brand and a person for that company face to face. Sometimes there's reps there that taking their orders, especially the larger showrooms and the larger brands, but a lot of times you can connect with a salesperson or someone from that company right at market, and those connections are very important, especially in our industry. I can't tell you how many connections I've made at market that have furthered connections with companies where I'm able to go deeper with those companies, and we'll talk about that next. But let's talk about a few markets, because when you're searching online, Google doesn't just show you this awesome place where you can find all the markets across the US. Or the world for that matter. You really have to dig. You have to dig into your industry. You have to dig into some searches. But let me give you some resources that you can find more information about markets. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a ton. There are a ton I don't even know about. So look in your area wherever you live, because I'm sure there is a market or a trade show for your industry close by. But there's really 4 that I love. That I can recommend for you because I've been there. And I've got websites for you. I'm going to spit them off as I'm talking here on the podcast, but also know these are in the show notes. So you can click right over and the links will be there inside the show notes if you're driving or walking and you're just listening today. But I live close to Dallas, so there is the Dallas market that I go to, and that's DallasMarketCenter.com. And so you can find— there's apparel markets, there's Kids World, there's Western Markets, there's the gift show. All kinds of different things. And not only are there places for you to buy and meet new vendors, they have workshops, seminars. You can really attend a lot of different things. Um, NY NOW, that's the New York NOW market, so it's NYNOW.com. Las Vegas Market, and that's just LasVegasMarket.com. There's also the ASD Market out in Vegas every year, so those are different markets that you can check out there. The other one that I go to every single year is the Atlanta market, and that one's called americasmart.com. So these would really be my top markets that I attend, that I have attended and continue to attend. And so you can go to those websites, you can check out the dates, you can check out where they're at. It might also help you when you're searching for other things as well. I did find a really interesting resource that I have not found before when I was researching for this podcast episode, and I'm going to put it in the show notes as well. But there's a website called greatrep.com. That's greatrep, R-E-P, greatrep.com. And if you click on the little button that says trade shows, there's a nice little list of all these shows that I was telling you about just a minute ago, but there's smaller ones too. And when I click through on several of them, these look like they were great shows. So that might be another great resource for you to bookmark in your browser. You can check through and see if there's anything close in your area and check out some of the markets there. Now, when you're at market, the best thing for you to do is to really connect with people. I've already told you that. That brings me to number 5. So the number 5 way to find products for your subscription box would be to white label or private label through another company. And I just told you, I go to market and I meet people and I meet business owners, I meet brand owners, I meet sales reps, I meet directors in their companies. But when I'm talking to these people and I'm telling them about my subscription box, it's an opportunity that many of them give me to create custom products through their company and white label or private label them for my own brand. And so what this means is I can go to another company that makes different bags or different vests or different jewelry and say, okay, I want this style that you have here, but I want it in this color and this design and this shape, and you're going to put my company's label on it. So that's called white labeling or private labeling. And when you work through another vendor like this, it really takes a lot of the legwork away from you. One, they already have supply chain, so they already have manufacturers, they already have their supply chain set up. It's like clockwork for them. It's nothing for them to create custom products. And when you can do that through another company, it takes so much stress off of you as the small business owner to figure out manufacturing and shipping and customs and how you're going to get it to your door. They do that every day. Let them import it for you. You don't have to deal with any import, and then they ship it directly to your door. So I love going to market to meet companies for this very reason, and I work with multiple brands and multiple companies to provide products like this for me. So that's another great way— white label or private label through one of your wholesale vendors. Number 6 on my list of how to find products for your subscription box is going to be through a global marketplace. And when I'm talking about a global marketplace, I'm talking worldwide website that you can buy products from. You've probably heard of AliExpress, maybe Alibaba, maybe Indiamart, but I've used all three of these to purchase large quantities of items for my subscription box. And what I love about these marketplaces is that you can just start searching. You can get ideas, you can develop custom products through these marketplaces. They have a lot of times stuff in stock ready to ship. So if you find something that you like, you can search with items that are ready to ship. So that's called RTS, ready to ship, and they can literally package them and get them out the door right now. If you need a large quantity of products. You can select from something that they already make, or you can send them pictures, videos, um, designs. You can send measurements of something that you want to have made. And so they can do ready-to-ship items that they're shipping out all the time. They can do custom items for you. So they can do all the manufacturing. They can even private label those for you, put your own packaging, your own products your own labels in there as they're making it for you. Now, when you're using a global marketplace, a lot of times there's a longer lead time because it's coming from overseas. And at the beginning of this episode, you heard me tell you that shipping and transportation and product sourcing right now is a hot mess, and it's a hot mess because of what's happening with our shipping. The shipping by sea, there's less boats. Shipping by air, there's less planes. And so, and actually when it gets here to the US, getting transport, trucking transportation to get to your door from port to door, that's a hot mess right now too. So you've got to work with longer lead times. So you have to have yourself planned out right now 6 months, 8 months is ideal when we're talking about custom manufacturing. If you use AliExpress or just something that's ready to ship, you can literally have it air freighted and it can be here in a couple weeks. So there's not as much lead time there as there is if you have something custom manufactured for you. And if it's large quantities, you do want to have it shipped by sea because it's going to save you so much money. But sea shipping usually takes about 30 days just to get it across the ocean, so With all the extra obstacles that we're dealing with right now, you really need 60 days when you're doing sea shipping. So just think about all of those things, but it's totally an option. If I saw in the group in my Launch Your Box membership, in our Facebook group the other day, someone said they purchased items from Alibaba, my very first purchase, and the date— she had the date on there, but it was literally 2 and a half weeks and they showed up at her door. So that's how quickly you can get stuff. And so I don't want the, the sourcing and shipping issues that are happening right now because of the pandemic to, to really steer you away from this. I just want you to give yourself a little extra time when you're ordering something for a box. Maybe you don't order it for next month's box, but if you can plan a few ahead of time, it's really a great option, saves you money. Saves you stress, saves you time by getting something that you know you can get in large quantities. As we're talking through sourcing from the global marketplace, I also want to bring up that when you source through a website like AliExpress, Alibaba, or Indiamart, you're protected. So there are protections with your money, with your products. When you take that business offline, some people on those websites want you to order through a different site. You lose those protections. So anytime that you find a vendor on one of the global marketplaces, make sure your transactions go through their protected services online and that you don't take your purchases offline because you lose those protections that those websites have built in. They know it's scary for you to give your money to halfway across the world and not knowing them, not knowing if you'll— if you're going to get your product or not. So they build in these protections so that you feel safe ordering product in that way. They have reviews just like Amazon. You can go see their stars, you can go see people's past purchases. I always recommend that you vet your sources when you're doing that online, just the way you would when you're buying something on Amazon or you're checking Yelp for where you want to go for dinner. Another way to find products for your subscription box is going to be through sourcing services. So just how I told you how you can go to Alibaba, AliExpress, Indiamart, you can do that online. You can also hire a third-party service to source products for you. And I love, I love this idea because again, it takes some of the stress and the pressure off of you. So there's companies like Sourcify, manufactured, and even procurement that will source products for you. And I, and I love to talk about procurement because they specialize in helping subscription box owners. And so what you can do is you can give them pictures, lists of all the things that you want in your subscription box, and they will go do the research for you. So they're going to check with manufacturers, they're going to check with their vendors. They actually have people in the countries doing the sourcing, at the manufacturing places so that it's not somebody you don't know. It's not somebody that you haven't heard of. They're dealing with these factories every single month for all their different clients. So they have a relationship with them. They have established quality and, and checks and balances with these people. And so you want to do this when you're hitting larger volumes. So when you're past maybe the 300 mark, that's when you want to start looking at using a sourcing service to help you with this if you don't want to do it yourself. If you haven't done any different avenue here, this is a great opportunity to have a company do it for you. And so when you look at what we've just talked about, it's as simple as checking with other local businesses in your area to finding Facebook groups online that have— there's tons and tons of wholesale groups You can check direct vendor sites. If there's a brand or, you know, a company that you want to buy their products from, just go directly to their sites and apply for a wholesale account. You can use wholesale accounts like Tundra, Fair, Abound, tons of vendors. And what I love about those, can I just say, is that it's one place you can buy from a ton of people on one app. You have— you don't have to go apply all these different places. You do one application with them, and that's what I love about those sites too. Hit up a trade show, go to a market, spend some time meeting vendors, making relationships, finding products, getting inspiration. Another thing about going to market is that you see trends, you see what's coming up, you get to really get inspired about all the different things that you see, and sometimes that really helps you put a box together for several months at a time. Talk to those vendors, see if they do custom orders, see if they can do private labeling. Maybe they do, um, whatever their designs are in any different pattern that you want. So many vendors will work with you on those things. Check out Alibaba, go through Indiamart. Don't be afraid of a global marketplace. You've got to just dip your toe in and do it something small that's far off in your boxes. So not next month, but several months down the road. Try it once, you'll get hooked. It's really easy. And if you're afraid of doing all that by yourself, you can definitely hire a sourcing service company to do it for you. So lots of different ways that you can find product for your subscription box. Don't let that be the reason you haven't moved forward. Dig in and get started. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist, and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.