Licensors are increasingly experimenting with “membership boxes” as a means of product sampling, promotion, and revenue generation.
Membership boxes are delivered to customers monthly or quarterly on a subscription basis. Each box contains a selection of products, themed around a particular topic or focused on a specific product category, with the price typically about half the value of the contents. The curated collections can, on occasion, include licensed items or focus on an individual designer, celebrity, or entertainment property.
Some of the services that have worked with licensors include:
• Quarterly Co. Subscribers receive a box of products every three months, selected by a celebrity of their choice, along with a letter showing why each product is meaningful to the curator. Some of the celebrities who have been involved with the company include chef Andrew Zimmern, Bill Nye the Science Guy, editor and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia, and musician Pharrell Williams.
• Birchbox. This service focuses on new beauty, grooming, and lifestyle products, and it sometimes creates themed Birchboxes tied to designers or other licensors. Its collaborators have ranged from USA Network, for men’s Birchboxes tied to its series SUITS (including a custom pocket handkerchief designed by the show’s star), to Cynthia Rowley, who rolled out her new signature make-up collection in monthly Birchboxes, as well as offering products on the company’s e-commerce site.
• SuperAwesome, a children’s marketing platform that has a program in the U.K. called Box of OMG. Ten thousand kids have signed up to receive free boxes of products, movie tickets, DVDs, and the like, with some of the assortments including licensed items. Carte Blanche supplied Moshi Monsters soft toys, for example, licensed from Mind Candy. Mattel sent out 6,000 custom Boxes of OMG sleepover kits tied to Ever After High.
These ventures, which have occurred over the past couple of years, all exist within broader ongoing membership box programs. This year has brought a new twist to the technique, however, with the debut of subscription box services in which the entire program is dedicated specifically to particular properties or groups of properties.
For example, Wizard World Comic Con, which organizes comic conventions across the country, introduced a monthly box service called the Comic Con Box. Each shipment contains exclusive t-shirts and premiums tied to Comic Con-friendly properties such as Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Legend of Zelda, among others, as well as Comic Con tickets, gaming controllers and headsets, Roku Streaming Sticks, and the like.
And Funko, a collectibles marketer and licensee, launched its Marvel Collector Corps. subscription box service, which features apparel, accessories, and collectibles tied to Marvel properties. The boxes are often timed to movie releases, including Avengers: Age of Ultron and this past weekend’s release, Ant-Man.
Raugust Communications’ July e-newsletter goes out tomorrow, with the Licensing Trend of the Month focusing on the evolution of fashion collaborations within the entertainment/character licensing business. Subscribe in the sidebar at the Raugust Reports home page, or below if you’re reading this online.
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