I've been a subscriber since nearly the beginning but I'm not renewing. The service itself has become incredibly subpar and they've screwed up quite a few times. Add in the fact that they force you to use points or they expire and the products are always overpriced. They had a bunch of customers and I imagine I'm not the only one who no longer sees the value. This tells me more about their product no longer holding the same value more so than the current technology situation.
Same experience here. I regret buying a yearly subscription as I just received the same product two months in a row and another one I got a couple months back.
I interviewed for a very senior finance role at a public company a few days ago.
The entire group of analysts and managers is based in a southern US state, while the executive team resides in NYC. Pretty crazy, but makes sense from a business stand point.
I don't think there'd be much trouble on the engineering side. Let's be honest, there's not much tech in box-o-the-month services. It's the business and marketing folks that benefit from being in the dynamic cities.
The problem is the sales order flow and fulfillment / operations at scale (which is an engineering challenge).
When you're in a growth period that's easy to discount, your challenge is (and should be!) top-line revenue. But in a crunch shaving 20-50% of order processing and fulfillment costs is mana from heaven, creating profit where one there was only red ink. That takes a hand-rolled system, and ops-eng is hard and requires very specialized knowledge.
Maybe in a conventional ecommerce company but monthly boxes are infinitely easier to manage ops-wise. You only have a dozen or so SKUs, know exactly how much you need weeks in advance and have months to plan everything out.
tl;dr: so you haven't actually implemented a scale ops system, eh?
A) Shipping pre-packed boxes is not substantially easier. Order assembly/fulfillment is not the hard part of ops. Sort of like HTML is not the hard part of web development. It's just the part laypeople experience first-hand.
B) Birchbox is investing a lot in follow-on ecommerce sales of the same products they ship monthly anyways, so they don't get to make simplifying assumptions.
C) Birchbox is substantially harder than a traditional pick&pack setup. It's unique enough that they have to build their own model, makeup is perishable (so skus aren't fungible!), they have hundreds of small providers by design, and their sku set cycles fully every month or two.
Source: I built system & ops for a company with both a subscription business and substantial real-time eCommerce ops, which is comparable in size to Birchbox USA.
I was a member of dollar shave club then realized it took me half a year to use just 1 box.
I'm quite lazy and the razors are incredibly frustrating to open so I end up just using 1 as long as possible. So I just quit my subscription and when I need new razors I sign up again. Funny thing is the first month they always give you a free shaver with the razors so it works out well for me. I want my money's worth, damn it.
