From steaks to soap, deliveries arrive without even a click
Subscription plans popping up all over
Shoppers have grown used to being able to simply click and order an item online. But increasingly, they don’t have to do either — and goodies will still show up at their front door.
Within the past decade, hundreds of subscription retail services have quietly sprung up, offering customers regular deliveries of products from ground beef to laundry detergent. They have become yet another, perhaps easier way to try and buy products without ever visiting an actual store. Some examples:
Beauty products. Birchbox helped pioneer the idea of sending surprise assortments to monthly subscribers when it began curating collections of beauty samples in 2010.
Footwear. Shoedazzle offers subscribers a personalized selection of footwear that changes every month.
Meat. ButcherBox delivers grass-fed beef as well as organic chicken and pork to consumers’
doorsteps.
Some of these subscription services have grown immensely valuable. Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever for a reported $1 billion in July.
The subscription model has even attracted a few major online retailers, who focus on automatically replenishing household essentials. Amazon launched its Subscribe & Save offering in 2007, allowing shoppers to set up regular deliveries of items ranging from toilet paper to toothpaste. Target’s subscription offering, first tested in 2013, now includes roughly 16,000 items.
It’s a “new way of doing commerce that offers a lot of convenience,’’ says Michelle Grant, head of retailing research at Euromonitor International. “I think consumers will expect to have that option for goods they don’t want to spend time shopping for, and that will impact retailers that have a bunch of stores that are based on in-person transactions.’’
Rather than that general approach, subscription box services fill specific niches. Customers usually fill out a profile detailing their personal preferences, then a personalized box is sent to them for a fee, often on a monthly basis.
ButcherBox, for instance, lets subscribers choose the types of meat they prefer. For $129, the shipment can include between 8 to 11 pounds of grass-feed beef, antibiotic-free chicken and pork delivered to their home, along with recipes. In addition to basics like ground beef or sirloin steaks, the boxes include a featured cut not easily found at the local supermarket. Next month’s selection will be beef cheeks.
Birchbox currently has more than 1 million subscribers, and, counting its website, a total of 4 million customers.
For $10 a month, Birchbox sends subscribers individualized boxes containing five beauty-re- lated samples.
The hope is that after trying out the various products, they’ll visit the Birchbox site and buy the full-sized versions. Currently, half of the company’s subscribers seek out regular-sized products online. The company also has a standalone store in Manhattan, and has launched two of its own brands.