PSA: Be aware of data hostage practices
Sew What Box is a family-run subscription box that delivers fun and useful sewing projects to its members, all cut and packed in the USA.
With pre-cut pieces, easy-to-follow tutorials, and projects that can be finished in an average of 90 minutes, Sew What Box aimed to bring the fun, joy, and creativity inherent to the art of sewing to a new, time-strapped audience.
“Wanting to increase the positive impact that these fun and easy projects could have in the world (while also getting tired of lugging 25 sewing machines around from location to location), we converted the pre-cut project model into a subscription box format.”
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The concept for the Sew What Box was born out of a series of ‘Sip and Sew’ classes that its founders had held back in 2018, where attendees were consistently in awe of what they were able produce with minimal experience thanks to the founders’ pre-cut patterns and high-quality equipment.
As the classes grew in popularity, the idea to shift to a subscription model became logical — but to truly go all in, they needed to a platform that would help them deliver as seamless of an experience at home as they were doing in person.
Initially, Sew What Box's founders opted for a stack consisting of Shopify, using Bold, Seal, and Stripe, which not only fell short of their requirements, but also proved increasingly difficult to manage consistently.
Their biggest problem had to do with customer profiles and processing renewals - in practice, Shopify’s tendency to create guest profiles for new customers led to some severe difficulties processing renewals.
Although Sew What’s founders pinned it down to an API error linked to Stripe, affecting around 1/4 of their merchants, they knew they needed to do something or risk the problem spiralling out of control over time.
Deciding to tackle the low-hanging fruit first, Sew What Box’s founders reached out to Subbly to help them migrate the other 3/4 of their subscribers from Bold, and the rest was history.
Taking the leap to migrate to Subbly just over 2 months ago was one of the best decisions they could have made.
Not only were they able to move over the other 3/4 of their subscribers, they were also able to migrate their storefront too, using Subbly’s website builder as well as a host of other features on the Advanced plan to ensure every moving part was working in harmony like a well-oiled machine.
As for the other 1/4 of subscribers? Sew What Box’s team set to work with Subbly’s own support team to set up a resubscription campaign and attempt to migrate them over the old-fashioned way — a demonstration of Subbly’s capacity to support both elegant, streamlined solutions and roundabout DIY experiments to fix the flaws inherent to other platforms.
In just a few short months, the majority of subscribers have now been moved over, with all new subscribers now entering the Sew What Box community through their new Subbly site. Feeling positive about the months to come, the Sew What team are prepping for the biggest year ahead as they continue marching towards their goal.
“Today, we still help sewists along their sewing journey with project inspiration, video tutorial explanations, time-saving pre-cut sewing project pieces, and sewing community. We are blessed to have been serving the sewing community since 2018, and look forward to many more fun years of creativity!”
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