Subscribe to Life

Every week it seems a new service is popping up which is subscription based. Traditional monthly subscriptions have existed for years (e.g. fruit of the month club at Harry & David). However, the buzz about monthly subscriptions seemed to pick up around 2010.  Just a few years later, the breadth of subscriptions available leads me to questions what is still left to tackle.

Today, let’s break down some of the subscription services available and the costs associated with them:

Beauty

  • BirchBox Cost: $10.00 per month for women and $20.00 per month for men

Clothing

  • Women:
    • Stitch Fix | Cost: $75.00 price per item on average (5 items per box or an average monthly cost of $375)
    • CakeStyleCost: $50.00-$450.00 per item
    • Le Tote– A little different in that you return the items. Think Netflix but for clothing | Cost: $49.00 per month
  • Men: Bombfell | Cost: $69.00 per month
  • Active wear: Ellie | Cost: $49.95 per month for two pieces
  • Shoes:
    • JustFab | Cost: $39.95 per month
    • ShoeMint | Cost: $79.98 per pair monthly 
    • ShoeDazzle– no longer offers this. Instead create a unique boutique for each buyer | Previous cost: $39.95 per month

Food

Children

  • Learning Projects: Kiwi CrateCost: $19.95 per month 

Extras

  • Pets (don’t forget your dog!)
    • BarkBoxCost: $29.00 per month
    • Jr. Pooch– clothing subscription for dogs. The descriptions make me laugh.
  • Green: Homegrown Collective | Cost: $39.00 per month
  • Boxes of Favorites:
    • POPSUGAR | Cost: $35.00 per month
    • FancyCost: $39.00 per month
  • Gifts: Subscription to any of the above services

What’s the grand total you may ask? To have a personal experience selected for you every month will come at a price of $203.85 each month (female) or $123.95 each month (male). That is assuming you chose the cheapest subscriptions, don’t have a child or a dog, and don’t like extras.

This list is just the services that I’ve heard about. Doing my research, I stumbled across a blog dedicated to this topic that has an impressive directory that you may want to check out.

Now the question remains, what subscription service is the world missing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Super Bowl Sunday

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The Super Bowl is a great time to go shopping. The malls are empty and it is the time of year when you can start to look at spring clothes. However, with the 49ers playing this year, I felt that as a resident of SF, I needed to watch the game. It was a good game with a rough ending.

The highlight of a Super Bowl party is the extremes of sweet and salty food. I took the game as an opportunity to make pretzels for the first time with cheese sauce. The recipe was posted on Pinterest from the site Smells Like Home. Although it took more time than I originally anticipated, the work was worth it. I doubled the batch and was pleased that I did. However, my mixer had mixed feelings about handling that much dough. The cheese sauce was OK. Next time I may try to make a sour cream or ranch sauce with chives.

On the tech side of the world, it is great to see the evolution of big companies using social media. @Oreo rocked it. With the power outage they quickly came up with a witty tweet. Articles today credit the fact that they had a team setup with complete control to execute on a real time campaign. The work really paid off in terms of buzz. I would be curious though if they will be able to correlate it back to Oreo sales.

Success is a journey…

Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. – Arthur Ashe

Thank you Brian for sharing this quote! It feels very appropriate for so many startups (mine included).