Do you think current supply chain issues only affect big corporations? They don’t. All business owners are dealing with supply chain issues right now. And that includes subscription box owners. I’ve heard some subscription box owners going down the road of doom and gloom. Wondering if it’s time to just give up and throw in the towel. Um, no. It’s absolutely NOT time to give up. It is time to problem solve, to pivot, and to plan. If you are a subscription box owner, you WILL run into product supp...
Nov 17, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Have you thought about taking your subscription box business from a side hustle to a full-time gig? It’s absolutely possible. I did it and so have many members of Launch Your Box. But… Before you quit your full-time job or make any major changes to your business, you need to ask - and answer - some questions. And you need to get really comfortable with your financial details, business and personal. Take your time and get real about what your goals are. Are you currently working 40/50/60 hours a ...
Nov 10, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 43
“Come up with a simple plan and work it!” I am so excited to bring you my interview with Jamie Shahan, Launch Your Box member and owner of CRNA Swag. Jamie’s subscription box journey shows us what is possible when a plan, consistent engagement, and the willingness to “just do it” come together. In addition to being a subscription box owner, Jamie is a wife, mother, proud grandmother, and a certified nurse practitioner anesthetist. In other words, she’s a busy woman! Jamie started thinking about ...
Nov 03, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 42
“If you are waiting for the day you have everything perfect, you’ll never launch.” I am so excited to bring you my interview with Cassandra Ross, Launch Your Box member and owner of Thread Crate. Cassandra’s story is full of inspiration with a side of “just do it.” Cassandra always sewed as a hobby, getting most of her fabric and supplies from local fabric stores. When the pandemic hit and her local fabric stores had to close, Cassandra turned to online shopping. She got supplies from different ...
Oct 27, 2021•30 min
Have you ever wondered what a typical week looks like for me? I get that question a lot and truly, there is no such thing as typical. Every week brings its own set of challenges and surprises, but I have developed a schedule to help me meet one major goal. Leaving work by 3 PM. I have two teenagers. And in addition to driving them to all the places for all the things, I want to be home for them. They’re getting older and my years with them at home are growing short. So… I set up my weeks to give...
Oct 20, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Guest: Betsy Goodman - The Lettering Box Have you ever wanted to sit in on a one-on-one subscription box coaching session? Well, you’re in luck. Today’s episode is an interview with Besty Goodman of B Goods Lettering - a Launch Your Box member who was in the middle of launching her subscription box when we talked. Betsy has an existing stationery and wax seal shop and also teaches hand lettering online and through local workshops. She got the idea for a subscription box last year, when she reali...
Oct 13, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 39
“You can’t just put it out there and it works.” - Pam Rodgers Today’s episode is packed with so many golden nuggets! I’m super excited to introduce you to a member of Launch Your Box! Pam Rodgers is a Nurse Practitioner, which means her full-time job is absolutely nuts right now. Pam decided her career in medicine wasn’t keeping her busy enough and turned a love for nail polish into a home-based business. As a child and again as a nursing student, Pam took her stress out on her fingernails. She ...
Oct 06, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 38
I talk a lot about the importance of audience building for subscription box owners. You have to build your audience in order to build your subscription box business. One of the best ways to build your audience is through the use of short videos you record and use on Instagram stories and reels or on Tik Tok. These videos can also be turned into Facebook video ads. All of which help you build your audience. Today, I’m thrilled to have one of my biz besties - and someone who does short videos bett...
Sep 29, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 37
We’re subscription box entrepreneurs, which means when we’re not creating a unique box experience for our audience, we’re building that audience of subscribers for our box! We spend so much time getting in front of our audience and gaining those subscribers, it kind of hurts every time we lose one of those subscribers for whatever reason. But let me ask you a question: are you also putting as much time and effort into keeping those subscribers that are in danger of leaving? This week I’m going o...
Sep 22, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Everyone starts somewhere in this subscription box business. Sometimes you start with an audience ready and waiting for your box (if you’re already online), and sometimes you must build your business and audience from nothing. That’s where Donna Prudhomme started with her Plan, Lead, Educate box, but with a little Launch-Your-Box knowhow and some hard work, she was able to build her launch base to 65 subscribers! This week she joins me to tell the story of her first launch and how she put aside ...
Sep 15, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 35
The Fourth Quarter is coming, and you know what that means: the busiest shopping days of the year. If you haven’t started preparing, now is a great time to start. This week’s podcast is all about maximizing your selling potential for the holiday and really using the audience and subscriber base that you’ve already built to do it. I’m going to give you five ways to use the resources that you have to give more gift options for your subscription box. The Holiday Gift Box This is not one of your reg...
Sep 08, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 34
One of my favorite things that I’ve learned since starting the Launch Your Box group is how many unique kinds of subscription boxes are out there. This week I’m talking to Amanda Stucky, founder of the Mandy Lynn Plans Box, and her box is all about stickers made specially for Hobonichi Planners. What are Hobonichi Planners, you ask? That’s the same question I had coming into this week’s podcast, and Amanda was more than gracious enough to share with me what her niche was and how she started out ...
Sep 01, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 33
You have an idea for a subscription box and you’re excited to start building it for your audience. But where are you going to get all the items you need for a price that doesn’t break the bank? Or maybe you’re already sending your box out, but you’ve increased your subscriber base to the point that you need to start thinking about ordering in bulk. That’s the subject of this week’s episode, where I’m going to show you that there’s more than one way to fill a box. Where to Source Deciding what su...
Aug 25, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 32
This week I’m speaking with Claudia Ramos, founder of Shabbyboxes.com, about her unique story: how she went from having a box, to shutting it down, to launching a brand-new box and building to 100 subscribers in 60 days. How’s that for an attention getting headline! We talked about what she did to achieve this and how engaging with your audience is so important to building your subscriber base. From Zero to Subscription Hero Claudia had initially started off with another box related to her work ...
Aug 18, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 31
There is so much that can get in the way of our journey to success, but nothing stops us more than the doubt we put on ourselves. We all have pitfalls in our past and struggles in our present that threaten to make us think less of ourselves, especially when we’re trying to create something and share it with the world. The truth is that all the parts of our past, the good and the bad, are just parts of the story that makes us unique and helps us to be successful, not only as entrepreneurs but als...
Aug 11, 2021•56 min
When you’re just starting out your business, one of the things you dream about is getting followers and growing your audience. We get so stuck on the idea that only way to be successful is to have a huge following, that we’re not maximizing the following that we already have. Success doesn’t come from having a bunch of followers that just look at your posts and don’t buy anything, it comes from having an engaged audience and from having the right audience and not just any audience. When We are F...
Aug 04, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 29
No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we think about and plan for every possibility, something is going to go wrong. Don’t worry! It happens to all of us at one point or another. Being a business owner means that you need to be ready for when the worst happens, because how you deal with that situation can mean the difference between really stretching those problem-solving skills and becoming completely derailed. Don’t Let it Break You, Let it Make You The truth is that things are going t...
Jul 28, 2021•16 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Subscription Box owners come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of different products imaginable. The Creative Soul Box is no exception, with its owner Julianna “Jewel” Avelar not only curating a box with different jewel projects every month, but also creating and patenting the loom used to create the jewelry. She joined me this week to talk a little about her journey from working alongside creative people to developing her own creative business. “The Mother of Invention” Jewel herself lear...
Jul 21, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 27
This episode: you’ve done it! You’ve come a long way since your first launch, and you’ve built the foundation of your business but now it feels like you’ve hit a plateau in growth. Well, let me first say Congratulations! Your business is a success, but now it’s time to smooth out the ragged edges of your business and scale up to the next level. Here are 5 things I’ve learned on how to scale your business and smooth things out. Develop a Multi-Channel Marketing Plan First things first: you have t...
Jul 14, 2021•20 min
One of the hardest lessons that we as business owners have had to learn from 2020, it’s that business can change drastically in no time at all. A product that may have seen steady sales before can suddenly turn into dwindling subscriptions. That’s the situation that Sarah, founder of the Redheaded Camel, found herself in with one of her subscriptions, and it left her thinking that maybe it was the end of that part of her business. But that doesn’t need to be the end of the story! We’re going to ...
Jul 07, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 25
We’re subscription box entrepreneurs, which means we’re motivated by success and ready to take on new challenges as they arise. But we don’t need to take on these challenges alone! Behind the scenes we can have a support system to help us stay on track and even expand without getting overwhelmed. This week we’re talking about how Virtual Assistants can help take on some of those tasks and next level your business. Virtual Assistants Virtual Assistants are independent contractors who work flex sc...
Jun 30, 2021•44 min•Season 1Ep. 24
We all have our reasons for starting our own businesses. Maybe we want a steady source of income, or a creative outlet and connections with a like-minded audience or breaking away from the corporate lifestyle. But I think the thing that connects us all is a want to do something meaningful with our lives and make true those dreams we’ve had about the independence of running a business for ourselves. “I made a vow that I would not walk out of 2020 the same way I walked into it.” - Alyssa My guest ...
Jun 23, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 23
This week my guest is LYB OG Debbie Poole, founder of the Create Happy Box, and we’re talking about fear. Starting your own subscription box business is a risk and taking on risk means having to deal with fear. Fear is that thing deep inside all of us that all entrepreneurs will need to be able to deal with, because that fear follows you through your whole business. We need to be able to identify that fear and to know it for what it is so that we can deal with it and move forward. Know Your Fear...
Jun 16, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 22
One of my favorite things that I get to do with my subscription box each month is a live unboxing video. It’s a super fun way to engage with your audience and show not only your subscribers but also potential subscribers what kind of products are coming in your box and why you personally selected them. It can be a great community event that everyone can be involved in through comments and questions. If you’ve never done one before, hosting a live event can seem a little scary especially if you d...
Jun 09, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 21
A huge part of running a successful subscription box business is marketing yourself through effective online ads. Many of us turn to Facebook to run ads, but it can be frustrating to try and read through the data to see if those ads you paid for are actually working for you. On this week’s podcast joining me is my biz bestie Susan Bradley, owner of the Social Sales Girls, to help us figure out what works with ads and teach us that a successful ad doesn’t always equal a sale. “You Need 3000 Web V...
Jun 02, 2021•43 min•Season 1Ep. 20
This week I’m joined by Amy Baughman, founder of the Power Serging Subscription Box, who was so kind to talk with me about her box and realizing that things don’t need to be perfect to launch. Sometimes we get into our own heads about when is the perfect time to launch, or that the box isn’t ready, or whatever reason you might come up with. With these things rolling around in our heads making us crazy, it might just be time to launch “ugly,” or to put yourself and your box out there and keep mov...
May 26, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 19
When running your own business, it’s a guarantee that you’re going to get cancellations and negative feedback. Unfortunately, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and some of those people are only more than willing to let you know how much they didn’t like your product, your service, or whatever might be on their mind at that moment. Managing these kinds of customer service issues can get inside your brain and make you doubt yourself and your business, sapping away the mental ener...
May 19, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Joining me on the podcast this week is Alexis with her Creative Indulgence Box to talk about the idea of progress over perfection. Have you heard the saying “you are your own worst critic?” When you’re building your first subscription box for launch, we want everything to be perfect. Part of the drive to create a box in the first place is to give your subscribers that VIP experience they’ve come to expect, and we want to make that experience as perfect as possible. But you shouldn’t let that dri...
May 12, 2021•40 min•Season 1Ep. 17
When you’re first starting out with your subscription box, you might feel like you’ll take all the subscribers you can get. But that feeling changes when you hit your first hundred and keeps growing. What might have worked for your business at 50 subscribers might not work at 250, let alone 700! Such tremendous and scary growth happened to Cheryl Ham, founder of yARnaBLE subscription box, who is my guest this week to talk about how to approach sudden growth and how to avoid getting overwhelmed b...
May 05, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 16
One of the main concerns for us in the subscription box business is product supply. Who we’re getting it from and on what kind of timeline can create a huge amount of stress when things don’t go according to plan. Things have only gotten crazier with the global pandemic showing us how fragile our product pipeline really is. Let’s face it: we’re a product driven business with very little wiggle room for shortages. More than likely, even if you do have your shipping schedule figured out you’ll be ...
Apr 28, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 15
