157: Can Anyone Start a Subscription Box Business?

Do you keep doubting yourself? Are you unsure if you can actually start a subscription box business? This episode is for you. I'm peeling back the layers to my beginning so that you can see anyone can start a subscription box business. 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.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today we're talking about can anyone start a subscription box business? Here's what I say, and I say it all the time. I'm not special. And I don't mean that in a way that I don't think I'm great. And it's not about self-confidence or knowing that I'm good enough. It's just about making it clear that I don't have anything more than you. I'm not special. And I want you to let that sink in. I didn't have fancy investors. I didn't have a knowledge of how to start a business. I didn't have someone in my family that taught me all the things. I'm just an ordinary person who works really hard and doesn't give up. Anything you do in life is really about being consistent at it. You don't have to be the best at it. You just have to be consistent at it. And that's what I've done. And what you see right now, if you follow me on social media, maybe you follow me on my actual retail page, but what you see right now is, hey, Sarah has this multimillion-dollar subscription box business. You might see my thousands of subscribers, but what you should see is that I'm just like you. My beginning was a lot like you. Me just being a solopreneur working from the kitchen table while my kids were asleep. Me schlepping around my products to craft shows and pop-up shops all over the state. Me having the courage to rent a tiny little 600-square-foot space and call it my first retail location. Let's be honest, it wasn't really a retail location, it was more like a closet. But it got me out of my house because, like you, like many of you, if you've started a business, we typically start them from our home, not knowing, maybe just to make a few extra bucks here and there, maybe to help pay a bill around the house or a car payment or even a mortgage payment. But what happens when we start this business is that we don't realize what it could become. So that kitchen table starts to get full, and then it becomes the kitchen counter, and then it becomes the hallway, and I just had products all over my house. And a lot of that is just like you. I dreamt about this for years, not knowing how I would do it. I just knew that I had this fire burning inside of me, and it takes that one action, that starting action that leads to the next action, and before you know it, you're actually running a legit business. And it can give you a paycheck, and it can give you a freedom that you've never felt before. So can anyone do this? Yes. Recently I was on a podcast, it's the Tony D'Urso podcast, and we were talking about this actual— this topic. Can anybody start a business? What do you have to know to start this kind of business? And we talked about the different types of subscription boxes. We talked about all the niches that we have, all the different types of subscription boxes that we have inside Launch Your Box. We talked about how basically you— whatever industry that you're in, you could create a subscription, a box around it. And we've seen that inside our community so much. And so when you're sitting here thinking, can I really start a subscription box business? I want you to think about a few things and I want you to write these down. If you're a note-taker, I want you to sit down and just write these down because I want you to think about these things. I want you to really spend some time, just nobody around, silent, no noise, just in that clean white space of your mind. And I want you to think about what are your passions? What are you passionate about? What do you enjoy? What could you talk about endlessly? If someone says, tell me one topic that you could talk about nonstop. Yeah, I could talk about monograms. I could talk about graphic design. I could talk about subscription boxes. Like, what could you talk about endlessly? What kinds of things light you up? A lot of us subscription box owners are our ideal customer. The products that we put in our subscription boxes are products that we get excited about shopping for. So I want you to think about that. What do you get excited to go shopping for? How can you create an experience from what you know? A lot of the conversation that Tony and I had on his podcast was, I know a lot about this, what kind of experience could I create from that? And so I want you to really reframe your mindset on, on around these things. It's not about what I think I was going to sell the most. It's not about what's the trendiest, newest thing. It's about what you're passionate about, what you could talk about on end, what lights you up and gets you excited to purchase, and how can you create an experience around that. It doesn't matter if you've never sold product before. It doesn't matter. In episode 3 of this podcast, I'm talking with Ann Stuccio. She's a practicing dentist who only ever purchased dental supplies for her office. She never purchased any kind of different product. She never purchased apparel. She never purchased accessories. She never even understood how to do that. You'd get a dental magazine in from your dental supplier and you pick out your toothbrushes and your toothpaste and your floss, and you're good to go. But she created a box for women dentists that had all those different kinds of things. It wasn't about dental supplies, it was about what women wanted. It doesn't matter how old you are. Next week on the podcast, I'm talking with Bev Schweigert. She started her business at 55 after 6 months of retirement and brought in a quarter of a million dollars in sales last year. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter what stage in life you're in. Can I do this in my 20s? Absolutely. And I have students that are that age and they're building a dream when they're young. Can you do this in your 30s? I did. I started my business when I was 35. I'd worked in corporate America most of my 20s, and I knew I wanted something more out of my life than clocking in and out, punching a clock, and sitting in a cubicle all day. It doesn't matter how old you are, you can start something now. It doesn't matter if you've got kids at home. Stop waiting around. I did it with my crazy kids. I would get them on the bus in the morning, and then I would work all day, and then I would be home when they got off the bus at 3:30. I did it. In episode 129 of this podcast, I'm chatting with Amy Green. She's the mother of 3 and dealing with special needs. It's her time to do something for herself, and she's thriving with her subscription box business. But she built it around her life and her son's needs. What I'm trying to help you understand is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you know anything about this industry. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter what you have going on in your everyday life. We can all do this. It's like motherhood. When you think about, oh, I'm going to be a mom someday, I'm going to have kids. There's no perfect time to have kids. Like, if you keep waiting for the perfect time to have kids, you're never going to have kids because nothing's ever like perfect. You never have enough money in the bank. You never are settled enough at your job. You're never like ready for it. You just have a baby and you figure it out. Like most of us just have a baby and we figure it all out. It's the same with owning a business. You start a business and you figure it out as you go. You don't have to know it all. You don't have to have a business degree. You don't have to have experience in this. You don't have to have things perfect. You don't have to be the smartest. You don't have to be the savviest, the most put together. Let's be honest, I'm winging it most days. Let me tell you, this morning I was going live on my framed page to sell some new arrivals and our Mother's Day box, and I tripped over one of my mannequins, which hit another mannequin while I was live, and the whole backdrop fell It was like clean up on aisle 7 right behind me as I was live. And I just laugh. I laugh because that's real life. That's who I am. I'm a little klutzy. And if I was so worried about that live being perfect, I'd never do it again. I would be so embarrassed. But you know what? I laughed about it. I made a joke about it. And the people that were on the live with me laughed with me. It's just me being real. I'm not perfect. I'm far from it. I'm not special. I'm not special. But I know anyone, anyone can rinse and repeat my success because I lay it out for you. I am serving you in a way. I am an open book. I am transparent about how I did this, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I didn't do everything perfectly. But I learned from them and I adjusted. And I think if you can learn and adjust as you go, that's what makes you a great entrepreneur. The first step is really laying it out and visualizing what this could look like for you. I have this free work— worksin60workshop.com, and I want you just to sit down with some, and some Post-it notes, and I want to lay it out together with you. When you can see it laid out like this, what's possible for you? And you're going to