With the rise of curated subscription services, we no longer have to decide what to eat, drink, wear, read, listen to or grow. Is this the answer to the tyranny of choice, wonders Ruth Jamieson
Dear friends, family and colleagues, I have a confession to make. When I say I'm late because of public transport, at least 90% of the time it's actually because I can't decide what to wear. Or what to have for breakfast. Or what book to take. Or which nail varnish will best help me achieve the goals of the day. In short, I'm rubbish at making minor decisions. And, judging by the number of companies now offering to make choices for us, I don't think I'm the only one.
A curated subscription is a service that, for a monthly fee, selects products for you and delivers them to you. It's a bit like having your very own 1940s wife. Over the last year, services have cropped up to cover more and more aspects of modern life. For a monthly fee I can have Kopior Has Bean choose my bespoke coffee blend, Stack select my independently published magazine and Weekly Indie choose my fave new unsigned band. Tea Horse will select my brew. Carmine can pick out my beauty products. Threadless can choose what T-shirt I should wear.Love Your Larder can fill my cupboards with mysterious foodie delights and Sponge can bake me a monthly surprise cake. For £8,000 Net-a-porter will even send me a monthly pair of shoes for a year. And there are countless cheese clubs and bread clubs out there that really should get together and get some sort of cheese sandwich thing going.
It's like someone took the vegetable box scheme idea and genetically modified it to cover all aspects of our lives.
Curated subs fall into two main camps. The first aim to cure us of what Douglas Coupland called 'option paralysis' by making our choices for us. These are the vegetable boxes, the cake, T-shirt and art subscriptions. They often have an educational or avuncular tinge to them, such as theAllotinabox subscription that was created because "people are extremely busy ... and at the garden centre the variety is overwhelming and slightly confusing." Every quarter they send a bespoke box of seasonal seeds and products to help even the least greenfingered get growing.
Coffee subscriptions also aim to educate. I tried Has Bean's InMyMug weekly plan, where every Monday brings a bespoke blend of coffee and a YouTube video of tasting notes. I watched the clips as I drank, and felt more able to hold my own in conversation with the coffee snobberati with each sip. Hints of pineapple, you say? Chocolate? Digestive? Yes, yes and yes, I can taste them all. And to think I was raised on Nescafé.
The other type of lifestyle subscriptions stem from the belief that, as the song goes, You can't get what you want (till you know what you want). As such, they offer an ever-changing selection of samples and tasters - the idea being that when you find something you like, you go on to buy it more regularly. These include the tea sampling subs, the larder boxes, the indy magazine trials and the beauty boxes.
Beauty boxes are big news right now. For around £10 you receive a selection of 'deluxe size' samples, all beautifully wrapped. She Said Beauty's box comes with a website they're billing as Facebook for beauty, where you can rate products and follow people; Joliebox comes with its own beauty magazine; and Glossy Box also offers a Glossy Box for men.
Beauty boxes are big news right now. For around £10 you receive a selection of 'deluxe size' samples, all beautifully wrapped. She Said Beauty's box comes with a website they're billing as Facebook for beauty, where you can rate products and follow people; Joliebox comes with its own beauty magazine; and Glossy Box also offers a Glossy Box for men.
The beauty industry thrives on sampling. Brands want to give us samples. Consumers want to try them. But previously the only way of distributing these beauty tasters was a system called 'debasing yourself at beauty counter by begging for freebies only to leave empty-handed and convinced they had something really fabulous under the counter that they wouldn't give you because they didn't like your coat'. For someone whose method of traversing a beauty hall is scooting round the outside avoiding eye contact in case a salesperson straightens my hair or douses me in perfume, the new system of distribution is far preferable. Plus the samples are bigger.
Unfortunately, as I'm unaccustomed to having lots of samples, when I receive mine my monkey hoarder brain kicks in and I'm overwhelmed by an urge to hide my precious treasure (the samples) from the other monkeys (my boyfriend) at the back of the bathroom cabinet. After about a week, I feel secure enough to take some out and use them, and they are lovely. I even leave a few on the sink so any friends popping round will think I'm posh.
There is a certain appeal in delegating our decisions to someone else. By using experts to make minor choices for us, we have more time to hone our own specialisms (mine, for example, are eating biscuits and reading). The only tricky thing is choosing which subscriptions to go for. Hmmm, I wonder if there's a subscription for that?
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