101: 5 Reasons Why You Should Start a Subscription Box in 2023

Have you been sitting on your subscription box idea for just way too long? On this episode, I'm giving you 5 more reasons, as if I haven't given you enough, to get started in 2023. Stop sitting on the sidelines and let's take action to get your subscription box up and running this year. Come join me. 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. Hello, hello, welcome back for another great episode. Today we're going to talk about 5 different reasons why you should start a subscription box in 2023. And yes, I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, or maybe you're brand new and maybe this is the first episode that you're joining me on, this is for you. Let's get out of our head. Let's stop overthinking. Let's put an action plan in place because there's so many reasons why you should start a subscription box in 2023. And I'm gonna break some down for you today. So I'm glad that you're joining me. I do want to give a shout out before we start this episode. I got the best review this week and I wanted to share it with you because it's important. If you listen to a podcast regularly and you love the content, these reviews help our ratings on, say, Apple and Spotify and the charts. They help us stay relevant and stay in the top of the charts. And if you're at the top of the charts, you get more listeners and obviously it just grows and grows. And this says, episode 95 is a good reminder to keep it simple and keep it consistent, particularly if you want sales, because when we have sales in product business, someone receiving it is smiling on their face. I have a digital product, sewing patterns and fabric for boys and men, which I'm thinking about a subscription box. And Sarah always has something valuable to share, even when you think it doesn't apply to you. So I love that review. She gave me a 5-star review and that was episode 95. And it's just about sending the emails, making them about one thing. And I just wanna say thank you for sharing that review with me. And if you haven't listened to episode 95, jot that down, put that on your to-do list for this week. It's just a reminder that you don't have to overthink everything. And here she's listening to my podcast and she doesn't even have a subscription box yet, so she's learning things. Becoming well on her way to start her own subscription box. And so I'm excited about it. I'm excited about all the new people that are going to be starting a subscription box in 2023. And I hope that I have the pleasure of coaching all of you in your subscription box launch next year. But I wanted to share this podcast with you today because I was reading an article the other day. I'm really a subscription box nerd, like through and through. I read articles about industry stats and, uh, trends and things like that. And I read an article the other day that was talking about how the subscription box industry reached $22.7 billion in revenue by the end of 2021, and that it is expected to grow more than triple that by 2027. So when you think about us going into 2023, we are on the growth spurt of the subscription box industry. It grew super fast from '16 to '20. It continued its pace from '20 to '21 and '22, and it's expected to more than triple what it did last year over the next 4 years. And so I want us to use that to our advantage. Now, when they were getting a little more depth in the article, um, it was looking at what types of subscriptions made up most of the market share. The number one, the biggest part of the market share were replenishment subscriptions. And so that is for someone that maybe has like a coffee of the month or a soap or a scrub or something that you use and consume and you need more of, you need a replenishment. So that was the number— had most of the market share, over half of the market share on that pie chart that I was looking at. But the second big chunk, which I thought was fabulous in far as market share went, was curation subscriptions. And that's more of like my subscription. So I'm just curating a box for the, like the Monogram box, carefully curated products together. They're not consumable, most of them. So it's a curation subscription. And so that had a huge chunk of market share too. And I was really sur— I was not surprised to see that, but I was excited to see that because so many of the boxes in our group are mostly curated subscriptions. We do have several replenishment subscriptions. So I want you to keep that in mind. And when we think about a replenishment subscription, it can be as simple as that one thing of the month. We talked about this on an episode a couple of weeks ago, but that candle of the month, that soap scrub of the month, that coffee of the month, whatever thing of the month It could be as simple as that. So you don't have to make it overly curated to say that you have a subscription box. But I was excited to read that article because it gave me a lot of, uh, insight and hope into where the industry's going. It has been growing year after year after year after year. It's not stopping and it's not slowing down. And we're not talking millions, we're talking billions. Okay. And I want you guys to jump in and get part of that market share with your own subscription box. It doesn't have to be overly complicated and hard. We can do this very easily and simply. So let's talk about it. Let's break this down. I want to talk about 5 reasons why you should start a subscription box in 2023. And maybe you've been thinking about these reasons, or maybe you're thinking about your own reasons of why you want to start a subscription box. I mean, I could probably name 20, but I put 5 together for you today, so I don't bore you with my subscription box nerdiness today. But let's talk about the first one. You don't have to constantly sell. That's a huge reason to start a subscription box. You don't have to constantly sell. Let's go back. Let's rewind. Sarah, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I had a great little brick-and-mortar store location. I was teaching classes all the time. I was teaching painting classes. I don't paint anymore, so it's kind of odd when I say that, but I had a great store. I made a great living. I had a great location. I had customers every day. And sometimes when you have a brick-and-mortar store, you don't have customers every day. Like, it's legit. You could— it could be crickets. So I was very fortunate that I had a good following and great local following at that. But here's what happened. If I was the only employee, so if I left to go get something for lunch, I had to lock the door. If I was sick and couldn't come to work, I couldn't open for business and I couldn't sell anything. If something happened and there was like a snowstorm, guess what? Sarah doesn't make any money today. And that is the hard part when we are not only not online, but when we have only a physical location and we physically have to be there. Now things get quite a bit better when we are both online and in person, because no matter what happens, people can shop from you 24/7. But also, for people to shop 24/7, that means I have to show up, I have to post, I have to go live, I have to constantly do the things, uh, to get people to go to my website to shop. When you have a subscription box, you literally just sell it one time. You sell it to your customer one time and their payment hits on the renewal. Maybe that's monthly, maybe that's quarterly, maybe that's bimonthly. However you have it set up, you only have to show up and sell it to that person one time. You don't have to keep selling in order to make sales. All right, it's, it's the most amazing thing. And anyone that is just tired of selling their face off all the time, it's perfect for you because you don't have to constantly sell. Now, there are times that we got to show up and sell, and right now I'm recording this in December and we are selling our face off right now. Like, we have to show up and sell all the things. But when you have a subscription box, you're going to make a consistent, regular, recurring income without having to sell all the time. So that is number 1. Number 2, and I didn't understand this until about 6 months into having my own subscription, but you are going to create the most loyal raving fans out there. Now, I had a great local following with my store, but I had no idea what I was about to create when I started my subscription box. These subscribers are your biggest fans. They're going to follow you to the ends of the earth. They're going to show up when you show up, and they're going to buy almost anything that you put in front of them to sell. They are your most loyal raving fans. And when I put together a subscription box, I am thinking about my subscribers. I'm thinking about my long-term subscribers that have been with me for years. I have a lifetime value average that my subscribers, once they join, stay on average for 24 months. Can you just imagine going into a store and buying a monogram bag or a t-shirt every month for the next 24 months? That's literally what my customers are doing because they love their items. They love the way that I've curated it. They love the way that they get a chance to get to know me through me showing up on social media. In emails, on text. They love getting to know me, and I get to love on them every single month. Every month they're going to get something from me, a surprise from me to them. And you know what? If you listen to last week's episode, it was our 100th episode, and I had some of my mastermind, uh, ladies on that episode, and we were talking about struggles and wins. And Amy mentioned on that call that she didn't understand the power of, of her subscribers. She has a box called the Snooze Box, and that is the only thing that she has sold for forever, just the box. She only sold subscriptions. She didn't have a store. She didn't have a bunch of one-off products. She only sold her subscription boxes. And we encouraged her to sell some things. She had inventory she hadn't used. Let's show up and sell it. It's the perfect time of year to do that. And she couldn't even understand how much of this stuff her subscribers showed up and bought. And it blew her mind. And I love it because people don't get it. We think in our mind, okay, when I have a subscription box, they're going to stop ordering from me because they're getting all this stuff in their boxes anyway. They're getting similar things, different things. They have plenty of what I do. They don't need more, but they want more because they come in, they become invested in you. They want more of what you're offering and we have to keep serving it to them. So when you start a subscription box, you are going to create the most loyal raving fans that you've ever had in your business, and it's going to be powerful. Number 3, and this was a struggle for a long time. But number 3, the product that you're investing in is already sold. Okay? The product you're investing in is already sold. So that means when I work with a manufacturer or a vendor or I go to market and I buy products for these boxes, I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about how much of this should I buy? Do you think my customers are going to like it? Are people going to show up and buy it? Am I going to have to mark it down in 3 months? Like, I don't have to worry about the inventory because what I'm buying for these subscription boxes, it is already sold. So once I curate the box and show up with it and get it out in the world, it's a done deal. And I don't have inventory sitting around because it's already sold. Just relieve yourself. Of all the stress and pressure of what to buy, how much to buy, when to buy, when to sell, how long before I have to mark it down. Just relieve all of that pressure by adding a subscription box to your business. Because even if you have some of that, if you sell one-off products on your website or your storefront, you're going to have that no matter what. But if the bulk of your business that you do is in your subscription box, you minimize the risk. Of having product unsold. And so it's one of the top 5 reasons that you should start a subscription box. You start to even out the product inventory, your cost of goods sold line on your P&L, when you know that product is already sold by the time that you buy it. All right, number 4, you get to create a box and an experience that you're passionate about. You know, for a long time, you know, I've talked about you being your ideal customer, and it's okay if you're not your ideal customer, but I think it makes it harder for your business if you're not your ideal customer because so much of this is the know, like, and trust factor. And that includes, you know, showing up and speaking to these people live, or showing up in, in your messaging on social media or on your website or your emails or any of that. When you're passionate about what you sell, you show up in a different way. You show up with an excitement, you show up with an understanding, and you're able to talk to your ideal customer in a better way. And, you know, women are a lot different than men when it comes to business and when it comes to selling. And for a lot of men, and I'm not going to say every, every man because that's It's not true, but a lot of men view business and selling as transactional, but a lot of women view it as more emotional, more purpose-driven, more meaningful. We need to have something we care about to spend all of our time working on it. And so I'm gonna just encourage you to find something that you're really passionate about to create your subscription box around. Love what you do, and then you aren't just selling stuff. You're treating people with a carefully curated experience month after month. So number 4 on my top 5 is that you get to create a box and experience that you are passionate about. You're not just selling stuff. And number 5, which probably should be number 1, but I left it for the, for the end because I wanted to talk about it last. Number 5 is having consistent revenue in your bank account. That's a big deal. It's a big deal. We go on this feast and famine kind of roller coaster all year long with, I sold 100 things today, I sell nothing for the next 4 days. I sold 2 things today, I'm back, I sell nothing for the next 5 days. And, and it's up and down, up and down, up and down. And so what happens is your income is up and down. One day you're going and having steak and lobster, and the next day you're eating ramen noodles for the next 4 days because you haven't sold anything. And we want to even out this lifestyle, this ability to earn an income that isn't so up and down. And having this consistent revenue in your bank account from your subscription box is so important to stabilize your business. And it really goes back to the number 1 point that I made here. The number 1 reason is that you don't have to constantly sell. If I got sick today, or maybe I just needed a break and wanted to go out of the country for a month, I know that I would have consistent revenue in my bank account for the next month, even if I didn't show up and sell anything, even if I didn't post anything, if I didn't email anything, if I didn't text anything, if I didn't go live for the next 30 days, I would have all that money in my bank account from my subscribers. Because it's something that I've built over time and I can count on and I can rely on it. We can go back to March of 2020 for a minute, and I probably told this story a little too much. You probably know it by heart, but you know, I will never ever forget what my subscription box did for me in that moment. I was panicked and probably like a lot of you, depending on where you were with your business, or even if you didn't have your business yet, if you were worried about keeping your job at that point. When we were hit by the pandemic in March of 2020, I had just a little online presence. I had somewhat of an online presence, but I relied heavily on my brick-and-mortar store. It was bringing in probably 65% of my income a month at that time, and it was busy, and it was busy for many reasons. One, I had built that up for many years. Two, I had hundreds of local subscribers, so every time they would come in to pick up their subscription boxes, they were shopping in my store. And so it was creating a lot of income. And the other thing was I had very little online aside from my subscription box. It was very hard for me to, to even out my inventory because my retail store was busy so much all day long. It was like I'd finally get pictures taken and get it online and then I'd be sold out in the store and it didn't make any sense why I was working so hard. To sell it out in the store and not online. So anyway, long story short, when March of 2020 hit and my store was forced to shut down for more than 45 days, and at that time of shutdown, I didn't know how long that was going to be. I didn't know, you know, we were flattening the curve. It was going to be a week or 2 weeks or something like that. We just need to flatten the curve. We didn't know what this was going to look like. And I was already panicked about being shut down for 2 weeks. I didn't know how I was going to handle that. I had multiple employees. I had several employees and I thought, okay, well, if this store shut down, there's 60% of my income. There's 60% of my revenue because of my in-store traffic. But what I realized over the next several weeks was my subscription box. Would pay for everything over the next 45 days. The income, the revenue that I made from that subscription box paid for all my employees, their regular paycheck, even though they couldn't work. It paid the rent on the building that had to stay empty. They paid me, like, they paid my mortgage. Like, everything that I needed came from that revenue. From that subscription box no matter what was happening. And then I was panicked that because everybody was panicking, I would have a ton of cancellations. And actually that wasn't true because people needed something to look forward to. So if they knew my box was coming, they could look forward to that because there was so much uncertainty and unknown. People didn't cancel. And so having that subscription model, having that subscription box sustained my physical location and all the parts of my business until we were back up and running. And that was a huge eye-opener for me that I needed to get more of my business online. And so we spent the next 6 months getting everything in that store online. And then we started to realize that our customers weren't coming back. They were used to shopping online. We love the freedom that the online business gave us, and we made the decision at the end of that year that we were going to, we were going to shut down our brick-and-mortar store. We were going to move into a warehouse so that we could be more efficient and have more space to focus our online business. And I'm telling you, number 5, that consistent revenue in your bank account has changed everything for my business and for my personal life. And if you're wondering if a subscription box is right for you, and you could say yes to any or all of these points here, then it's time to stop thinking about it and start launching. We don't have to constantly sell. We can create these loyal raving fans. We don't have to keep throwing our dollars into product that we don't know if it's going to sell or not. You get to be passionate about your business. You get to create a box and experience for your business, and your bank account can be stable and have money in it every single month without you having to show up all the time and sell. And that's the difference. That's the difference between having an e-commerce business and having a subscription box. It is stability, reliability, and you know that you have income that's being generated every single month. And when you think about how many subscription boxes are out there and that stops you from starting one, because you might think, should I create one more box? Like, how many boxes are out there? I want you to go listen to episode number 22. I'm talking with Debbie, and she put her box on hold for a long time thinking there were enough boxes in her industry, and why did the world need one more dang subscription box? But when she finally got over that fear and finally got over that realization that they were ready for her and her box, magic happened. So I want you to put on your vision board, on your calendar, on your to-do list, whatever it is that you use, that you're going to have a subscription box launched in 2023. And I would love to help you do that. 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.