Home topics start-up-entrepreneur Startup Tips | Advice Startup The pros & cons of a subscription box business Nicole Monteforte April 20, 2017 We now live in a subscription economy, where offerings are both digital (e.g. Netflix, Spotify) and physical (e.g. Birchbox plus local start-ups Bellabox and Lust Have It) . From the consumer perspective, subscription boxes are a convenient and hassle-free way to receive the products that are meaningful to them. For businesses, it’s a potentially lucrative model – many are reaping the rewards of a 3000% increase in website visits to subscription box sites over the past three years. I started my own subscription box business last year. In the beginning, I transformed my living room into a warehouse full of boxes and product. The walls had all been covered with white board material and my fruit bowl was full of coloured white board markers! It’s been seven months now and I haven’t looked back. For those thinking of starting a subscription box business, here are the pros and cons I’ve encountered: The Pros Surprise & delight It’s incredible what impact real-life snail mail can have on customer experience. There’s so much potential to ‘surprise and delight’ customers with hidden gifts, notes and unexpected bonuses. Building a great customer experience around your brand is so important, it’s what spurs word-of-mouth marketing and user generated content on social media, so it’s lucky that we have this built into our business model. Recurring revenue In no way is revenue earned from