Our company is Life Without Plastic and we’ve been offering plastic-free alternatives for day-to-day products since 2006. In late 2019 we started a subscription box of plastic-free essential products to guide and encourage customers to take a first step toward plastic-free living and to show them how easy it is.
The birth of my son made me realize how surrounded we are with plastic and how little we know about its toxicity to human beings, especially babies who put everything in their mouths. I discovered that plastics may not be as inert as we think in their interactions with the human body, and that they remain in the environment for a very long time causing damage to wildlife and ecosystems during their lifecycle. I soon found out other people had the same concerns and were looking for alternatives. That is when I founded LifeWithoutPlastic.com
Our mission is to raise awareness on the health and environmental problems posed by plastics while making the solutions more accessible, and empowering people to be part of the change.
We published a book in December 2017 entitled Life Without Plastic: The Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Avoiding Plastic to Keep Your Family and the Planet Healthy. I’m very proud of that work and also that it’s since been translated into French, Italian and Japanese.
Every week, Subbly hosts a free webinar to teach budding entrepreneurs and business owners how to create recurring revenue. You’ll learn how to build a subscription ecommerce store from scratch and how to start selling subscriptions with any existing store.
For our subscription box, it did not take too long to get our first customers. We introduced our box ahead of the Christmas Holidays in 2019 and we got our first subscribers after publishing a newsletter about the box.
By having a subscription billing model, we can plan ahead of time based on how many customers we have. We do not have to acquire the same customers every season, and instead we can focus on getting brand new customers. The subscription model also forces us to always deploy our best efforts to try and WOW our customers and retain them as long as possible.
We explored a few other options, but we really liked how easy it was to insert checkout codes into our WIX website. Also, with Subbly we were able to add sales tax to our Canadian customers and no tax to the rest of our customers. And with the flexibility of getting two Subbly accounts in two different currencies, we can sell our boxes to our US and Canadian customers in the currency of their choice.
I would suggest trying to know your target market as best as possible to offer products that will meet their expectations. So many boxes offer things people don’t need just because the subscription company got a good deal on some random products. Each product should cater to the customers who buy the box, not to the suppliers of the products in the box.