Followers of Rachel Zoe and her online publication “The Zoe Report” will soon have a bit of the celebrity stylist shipped to their front door — Zoe is jumping into the subscription box fray.
The stylist is launching “Box of Style,” a quarterly subscription service that will send packages stuffed with five to eight items each season. Such services are among the Web’s fastest growing areas in everything from beauty — Birchbox — to fashion and accessories — BeachMint — to chocolates — Cocoa Runners.
“It’s really about targeting our audience with something special curated by me and editors at ‘The Zoe Report’ — providing a little piece of how we live everyday,” Zoe said of the initiative.
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The service — which adds to Zoe’s existing roster of projects, including a fashion line — will begin accepting subscribers through The Zoe Report’s Web site on March 9 for an inaugural March 31 shipment date. Boxes are priced at $100 a season or $350 for a full year. The items inside — sourced from the fashion, beauty, accessories and home markets — are aimed at The Zoe Report’s 18- to 34-year-old “fashion-obsessed” demographic.
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Each will include one “hero” item or a product that is valued at far more than others within the package. First up is a Miansai gold-plated screw cuff, typically priced at $200. Zoe would not disclose the profit margin she expects the boxes to provide, but indicated the products were purchased at below wholesale prices.
“I think it’s relationships, it’s talking to friends, designers, people being interested in getting on board and getting their product out there to a certain demographic and certain people. It’s good promotion for a designer,” she said.
Zoe declined to reveal additional products that would be shipped in the debut box. She said, “I want to love everything in the box, [but] it’s not necessarily going to be my style per se.”
The Zoe Report, soon approaching its sixth anniversary, is clocking in at one million unique visitors a month. Its newsletter has about two million subscribers and its social media outlets total 11 million followers.
While Zoe does not have a projection for how many subscribers she expects “Box of Style” to accrue, she did provide the aforementioned numbers as an example of its overall potential.
In a celebrity market where lifestyle sites like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop or Blake Lively’s Preserve constantly roll out new e-commerce initiatives, The Zoe Report’s expanded operations — boasting additional staff hires in the last year — appear to be trying to compete.
Labels aside, Zoe said that she does not often look at other lifestyle sites. “It’s about keeping your eye on the product and not getting distracted or deterred. I think for me it’s always about what I can do that’s new that engages our audience,” she said.