Liz Cadman has a pretty amicable relationship with her regular mail carrier, Neil. And the UPS driver. And the FedEx guy. She always makes sure to give them gift cards around the holiday season.
Between the three carriers, they deliver more than 100 packages to Ms. Cadman’s office in Scott every month.
One former mailman even had a contest with co-workers to see who delivered the most packages each day. That carrier won due to the sheer volume of deliveries to Ms. Cadman.
The packages aren’t predictable cardboard ones full of run-of-the-mill office supplies either — they might be floral boxes, nostalgic Nickelodeon-themed trunks and shiny, hot pink mailing envelopes stuffed with mascara, collectible figurines, underwear or dog treats.
The doorbell is constantly ringing at the headquarters of My Subscription Addiction, a company that has written reviews for the subscription box industry since the trend took over retail around 2012.
Since then, Ms. Cadman’s blog has grown into a full-time business with seven employees, nearly three dozen independent contractors and a cult-like following among subscription box junkies.
“And all of this started because I love getting stuff in the mail,” she said.
Living in boxes
Her obsession began with Birchbox, a subscription that delivers skincare and makeup items for $10 per month. Ms. Cadman couldn’t find box reviews, though, so she began writing her own.
Boxes began piling up at her home in Bethel Park while she was at work at ModCloth, an online vintage clothing boutique that started in Pittsburgh. Not long ago, it was acquired by Walmart.
By day, she worked on customer experience at ModCloth. By night and on the weekends, she wrote reviews for MySubscriptionAddiction.com.
“We basically turned our living room into a studio,” said Ms. Cadman, 33. “We were very much living all the time in boxes.”
She left ModCloth in 2013 to pursue the blog full time.
It was a well-timed move: between 2013 and 2016, visits to subscription box sites increased by 3,000 percent, according to data from Hitwise, a New York City marketing firm that measures behavior across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices.
Two years later, Ms. Cadman began hiring her former co-workers to help her write reviews, take photos and refine the website’s search engine optimization.
Even her husband, Eric, 34, left his gig at ModCloth as a software engineer to focus on building out the subscription website’s functionality.
Now he reviews boxes, too. His favorites are in the “geek box” category — he has a full wall of Funko’s “Pop!” figurines in his office to prove it.
Emily Cosnotti, creative director with My Subscription Addiction, works in the photo studio at the South Hills office in Scott. (Pam Panchak/Post-Gazette)
The final image of a floral arrangement from on-demand flower delivery box, The Bouqs.(Image courtesy of My Subscription Addiction)
Honest feedback
The team typically produces somewhere between 15 and 20 reviews for the website each day. When boxes come in, they’re queued up on a shelf.
If it’s clothing, employees try the stuff on. If it’s food, they cook it up and taste it. If it’s makeup, they look at the sample size, compare it to the full-size price and establish a value. Then, they share their opinions about each box in a post, complete with studio photos.
The company pays for half of the boxes out of pocket. The others are offered to the company for free, since brands want exposure.
To maintain editorial integrity, Ms. Cadman said she always works to give honest feedback, even if it’s not flattering, and never allows companies to see articles before they go live. In her posts, she discloses any items sent by the companies.
As the office piles up with stuff, the duplicate socks, eyeshadow palettes, accessories and more are donated to charities.
“I think everyone here has more socks than we’ll ever use … and they’re one of the items shelters don’t get enough of,” Ms. Cadman said.
Bucks from boxes
Since the My Subscription Addiction team moved into a real office, two notable box services have gone public: Stitch Fix, a San Francisco-based company that sends clothes to your door, and Blue Apron, a meal kit delivery service.
Blue Apron’s results were tepid. At its initial public offering last June, shares were trading at $10. As of Thursday, the going price was just under $4 per share.
So far, Stitch Fix, which has an engineering office in Oakland, has written a completely different narrative for box companies on the public market. Shares were $15 each during its IPO last year and prices have continued to climb to $32 as of Thursday afternoon.
Stitch Fix has a target audience that’s very much in line with market trends.
On average, retail box subscribers are usually women with a median age of 41 and a median income of $78,436, according to Shorr Packaging, an Aurora, Ill.-based distributor of packaging products.
That’s even reflected in My Subscription Addiction’s website traffic: About 95 percent of the site’s users are women.
Any time those users click a referral link on the My Subscription Addiction website that leads to a box company’s website, Ms. Cadman’s company can earn a commission on any interactions that become a sale. The process is known as affiliate marketing and it’s what helps keep the lights on. The private company didn’t disclose financials.
Here to stay
My Subscription Addiction isn’t the only box review site — a slew of blogs are riding the coattails of the subscription retail industry.
Hello Subscription is probably one of Ms. Cadman’s most direct competitors, but with an Instagram following of about 19,400, it pales in comparison to My Subscription Addiction’s 94,300 followers.
On average, the My Subscription Addiction website gets 1.5 million unique visitors and 9.3 million page views monthly.
Influencers realize that the key is to have enough scale, enough followers, said Jeff Inman, a professor of marketing and associate dean for research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business.
Although the retail box industry is becoming crowded, he believes that even a crash wouldn’t squash the ancillary review industry.
“I imagine that if the industry tanks, the bloggers and subscriptions box reviewers would try to pivot,” he explained. “Instead of just reviewing a box, they might review new cosmetics.”
Ms. Cadman hasn’t seen a slowdown in the box delivery industry. What’s more common, she said, is for a particular category to become oversaturated.
“About two or three years ago, it was the time-of-the-month subscriptions with pads and tampons,” she said. “It was smart because no one was doing it but all of a sudden there was 30 of them over six months.”
There’s an advantage to being first, Ms. Cadman said, but if a big brand enters the arena, all bets are off.
For now, Ms. Cadman and her team (including her terrior poodle mix, Buckles) are continuing to review boxes, post spoilers and update social media channels.
And for the last two or three years, she’s spoken at the annual Subscription Summit, a gathering for those that work in or alongside the new retail box market.
“It’s the only place that I’ve ever experienced in my life where people know who I am and I don’t know who they are,” she said with a laugh. “It’s very weird, very surreal.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
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First Published: July 16, 2018, 12:45 p.m.
