Subscription box craze hooks Corridor shoppers

Phoebe Simon, 45, of Coralville, needs nice clothes for the workshops and presentations she leads at her job at Stamats Communications in Cedar Rapids. But hitting the mall to keep her wardrobe fresh is the last thing she wants to do.

'I hate to shop with all my heart and soul. I would rather watch paint dry than shop,” she said.

So she signed up for Stitch Fix, a service that ships a selection of new clothes to her door on a regular basis - subscribers decide how often. It's just one of a huge array of subscription shopping services that have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years.

Such services vary in form and function, but most work similar to this: users sign up to receive a curated box of items each month or every other month. The subscription company then picks out the items and ships them. The trend took off with Birchbox in 2010, which sends boxes of beauty supplies - usually sample sizes - for $10 a month.

Susan Blind, 39, of Cedar Rapids, subscribed to Birchbox for two years and recently switched to a similar service, Ipsy. She said she likes getting to try new products without having to purchase full-sized bottles.

'I love cosmetics and bath and body products - and to be able to try five or six products every month - it's like Christmas every time it comes,” she said.

Simon, who used to get Birchbox but stopped when she had amassed a drawer full of samples, agreed.

'Just having that little thing in the mail every month is pretty addicting,” she said.

That monthly anticipation is part of what makes subscription boxes so popular, said Liz Cadman, the founder of the website My Subscription Addiction, which reviews boxes. She said there are over 1,500 boxes in her site's directory, with requests to add more coming in daily. The market has exploded over the last couple of years. Birchbox now boasts about a million subscribers, up from 600 five years ago. Today's shoppers can subscribe to nearly anything.

There are subscriptions for socks, subscriptions for shaving supplies and monthly shipments of craft beer, tea or coffee. There are boxes geared for comic book lovers or young adult fiction fanatics. Survivalist boxes provide supplies for the end of the world, and cat lady boxes offer items specifically for the cat owner, though there are boxes aimed at the cats themselves as well.

'There is something for just about everyone,” Cadman said. 'Every time I think we've got everything covered, something new launches.”

One growing area is meal kits such as Plated or Blue Apron.

Simon used to get Plated and is considering starting it up again. The service lets users pick meals from a menu, and Plated then delivers recipes alongside exact portions of ingredients in an insulated box.

'The thing is, I'm a working mom with two kids. My husband works at the University of Iowa,” Simon said. 'These things have improved our quality time together, because I don't have to go to the mall to shop or be late getting home because I had to stop at the grocery store to pick up ingredients and figure out what we're going to make.”

Plated, she said, 'Is a little pricey, but when we were calculating our time investment and stress, it was worth every cent. We never had a meal we weren't thrilled with.”

Not all the boxes are about convenience - some are just for fun. Simon also gets FabFitFun, which arrives quarterly for about $50 a box. Each box has an assortment of curated items from scented candles to workout DVDs.

'FabFitFun is my way of pampering myself, because it's nothing I need. It's just the excitement of getting something in the mail and the anticipation,” she said.

Jade Burgess, 30, of Mount Vernon, and Emma Drtina, 26, of Cedar Rapids, said they're obsessed with PopSugar Must Have boxes. The boxes, at about $40 a month, also come with an assortment of curated items, from jewelry to books to housewares.

'It's just the variety of it all I really like,” Drtina said. 'It's all this different kind of stuff that, if I saw it, I would want it but probably wouldn't buy it.”

There's a danger of spending more money than she would otherwise, she said, but for her, it's worth it. For Burgess, PopSugar is budgeted self-indulgence money each month.

'My husband gets me that instead of buying me presents,” she said.

She admits to being something of a subscription junkie. She also gets Stitch Fix, Ipsy, Glossybox - another cosmetics service - and Kiwi Crate, which has crafts for her children, ages 3 and 5.

She said in today's online shopping world, already filled with services such as grocery delivery, Netflix and Amazon Prime, subscriptions make sense to her.

'Amazon introduced me to the notion of getting everyday items shipped to you,” she said. 'The whole subscription mentality sits really well with me.”