This is part of uOpen’s 'Industry Insights' interview series - a valuable collection of informative and intelligent insights into how some of the UK's best-known and most-loved subscription box businesses came to be and got to where they are - all shared by the very people who made it happen...

Covering customer acquisition to fulfilment, this blog series offers a behind the scenes look at how the many moving parts of these complex, yet successful operations come together each month to satisfy the ever-growing demand of subscription box customers in the UK.

This is part of uOpen’s 'Industry Insights' interview series - a valuable collection of informative and intelligent insights into how some of the UK's best-known and most-loved subscription box businesses came to be and got to where they are - all shared by the very people who made it happen...

Covering customer acquisition to fulfilment, this blog series offers a behind the scenes look at how the many moving parts of these complex, yet successful operations come together each month to satisfy the ever-growing demand of subscription box customers in the UK.

How did the idea for your subscription box come about?

We didn't know very much about subscription boxes at the time. We hadn't really heard the term. We'd been working in informal science education for years across various science museums in the UK and Europe. We're passionate about getting children to have hands-on fun playing with science, and wanted to work together on our own project. We decided to reinvent the children's science kit. Our goals were to make them more fun, more educational and more convenient.

What attracted you to the subscription box model?

To make the kits as convenient as possible for families, we decided that they would arrive through the post containing everything the family needed to do all the experiments. The kits work as a series, so everyone does the same boxes in the same order, this allows us to include equipment in earlier boxes that the children keep to use in later boxes.

For example, the first box has safety goggles, so when they're needed in later boxes we don't need to include them again, this is more financially and environmentally sustainable. Also, the serialised subscription model means we can introduce scientific concepts in earlier boxes and reiterate and/or expand upon them later giving us a sense of narrative development over the 12 box series.

How did you validate your idea and test the market?

Early in our development process we went to a large event which was like a toy fair, but open to the public. We set up a booth with a lot of the experiments we were planning to do in our first few boxes. This allowed us to test the experiments out with children and see if they enjoyed them while also talking to the parents about the idea in general. Both of these aspects were well received. We also did a couple more small-scale testing days in our business park, testing out both the experiments and the concept with local families.

How did you acquire your first customers?

The toy fair event we went to was a big help. We did a newsletter sign-up while we were there which was quite successful. Other than that we spent a few months prior to our launch building up a buzz on social media.

Did you raise any seed or investor funding to help you grow?

We sold some equity to family members which helped with the start-up costs.

How long have you been running now and what are your most successful achievements and milestones so far?

We've been going just over a year. We have two different subscription boxes each of which is a 12 month series. That meant from the moment we launched we were committed to producing two new science kits every month. That's about 10 experiments which needed to be developed and thoroughly tested and a fully illustrated comic-book style instruction book to be produced each month.

It's been a huge amount of work but we have recently finished both series and are extremely proud of them both. Our first Christmas was a massive success. Our shelves were almost empty by the time we took our Christmas break. We're now really looking forward to next Christmas and will have even more stock prepared.

With the rise of new boxes launching all the time, what do you see as your USP that sets you apart from your competitors?

There are only a few other children's science subscription boxes. As far as I'm aware, ours is the only one that works as a series. We are also unique in that our boxes fit through letterboxes, and have everything the subscriber needs to do all the experiments. We didn't want to be that thing the parent has to go to the sorting office for each month, which they then open to find a list of extra stuff to go out and buy. We position ourselves as the bright, colourful, fun and slightly wacky one.

Our comic-book instruction books have strange little characters - which we call our lab assistants - having fun and taking children through the experiments. We're all about science being weird, messy and fun to play with. Of course, our kits are very educational, but our focus is on inspiring and motivating children so that they have a positive attitude towards science, and learning naturally follows from this attitude.

How does your business continue to find new and exciting products to keep your customers engaged and excited every month?

For the first year when we were developing two new kits each month this was a significant consumer of our time. For us, it's not so much about sourcing new and exciting products. A lot of the products we buy are fairly mundane (e.g. test tubes), the excitement comes from how we use them to come up with science experiments that have amazing and surprising results. Between us we've got a very strong interdisciplinary science background and years of experience in hands-on science education.

Have there been any particularly pivotal moments so far that have required you to make changes to how you operate?

We knew that offering 24 different science kits on demand was going to be challenging, compared to offering the same box to every subscriber on the same date each month. But the serial model is an integral part of our offering, so we put a huge amount of effort and time into planning and preparing before we launched in 2017, and as a result, have figured out a system that works well for us. So far we haven't had to make any major changes to our operation.

How large is your team? What type of roles do they have?

The Letterbox Lab team is husband and wife Bryan (me), and Mia Hatton. We've never formally established roles, but allow ourselves to find our own niches and swap responsibilities around occasionally. We also have a couple of people who help us pack the kits, one who is permanent part-time and another who helps out in busy times.

Across all operational areas of your business, what do you manage in-house and what do you outsource to external suppliers to support you with - and why is this?

We do almost everything ourselves. We write and illustrate the instruction books ourselves, but then we send them to a graphic designer to finish the layout and prepare them for print. We also have an accountant but do our own bookkeeping. At the start, we hired a branding agency who designed our logo and really helped establish the look and feel of our product.

What types of challenges do you face with fulfilment, delivery and customer service?

Keeping track of which customers have had which boxes, which one they are next due, and ensuring we have it in stock when they need it is a huge logistical task. We manage it by being very well-organised and always planning our box packing schedules well in advance. We have very few problems with customer service, people love our kits and almost never have complaints. Very rarely a kit will go missing in the post or something will get damaged in transit but we immediately resend it, the cost to us is small compared to the value of satisfied customers.

How do you see the subscription box industry is evolving and what do you believe are going to be your biggest challenges over the next 12 months?

I think it's still early days for the subscription box industry in the UK, and it will continue to grow from strength to strength. We see new science subscription boxes appearing in the UK all the time, and we are sure to see more arise in the future. We know that being earlier to market than these new ones certainly doesn't automatically make us better, so our challenge over the next year will be to continue offering fresh, new products to subscribers who have completed the series, whilst continuing to improve the series we have put so much energy into developing. We're excited about these challenges - watch this space!

What do you enjoy most about running your subscription box business?

I get to spend the day with the person I love, working on a project we love, which is nice.

What excites you about uOpen, and how do you see the marketplace featuring in your business' future?

It's great to see a bunch of different subscription boxes coming together in one place. We hope that uOpen will be a significant sales channel for us for years to come.