It’s always fun to be pleasantly surprised with a package when you’re at home. An old friend drops by. The IRS sends you a rebate. A box of stylish clothes, accessories or lifestyle products shows up at your door. By signing up with a subscription service, those boxes could keep on coming.
Trunk Club is the most well-known of these companies. To take part, you register online and answer questions about your clothing preferences. A Trunk Club stylist will then assemble a package and send it to your residence. You try on the items they send you, keep what you want, return what you don’t and pay for what you hold onto. The clothing costs about the same as any fine clothing store would charge for them.
You conveniently choose the frequency of those parcels. You could get one per week, one per month or however often you’d like. Once you receive your package, you have 5 days to return any unwanted items for free.
There are a few services like Trunk Club and five of the best are described below. They all follow the same basic pattern, but they all have their own quirks as well.
Bespoke Post
In addition to clothes and accessories, packages from Bespoke Post could include camping products, glassware, items for a home bar, coffee-making supplies and a wide range of other products.
Similar to Trunk Club, Bespoke Post removes the element of surprise. Once you’ve filled out your online profile, the company will send you an email at the start of each month. In that message, you can read a detailed description of every new themed box and choose the ensemble that sounds the most appealing.
Every Bespoke Post parcel is priced at $45 for subscribers and $55 for non-subscribers and each is shipped on the 15th of the month.
Bespoke Post buys its products in large quantities, often from small companies and up-and-coming brands. Those providers all have outstanding reputations and are dedicated to innovation.
Five Four Club
With Five Four Club, you start by filling out the standard fashion questionnaire. Based on your responses, a stylist will assemble a box of on-trend clothes and accessories. One distinction between Five Four Club and Trunk Club is that, with the former, you can’t return the pieces you don’t want.
Each of these packages costs $60 per month, which means a Five Four Club piece is considerably less expensive than a Trunk Club piece, which could be up to $300 for a product you would like to keep. Five Four Club produces all of the products (amongst a few other brands) it sends to its members and the total retail value of every package is at least $120.
Frank + Oak Elevate
Once called Hunt Club, Frank + Oak Elevate will provide you with an array of elegant outfits from the brand’s menswear collection. It doesn’t cost anything to join this club.
The system works as follows. You sign up and before the first week of each month ends, you’ll receive “style recommendations” from Frank + Oak. Basically, you’ll get a list of products in an email and you can select two of them to be sent to your home.
One of the major differences is that if you don’t fancy any of the pre-selected items, you can browse the whole Frank + Oak catalog and choose two articles of clothing from there. Together, those two pieces will cost $89. If you decide to send back one or both of them, the shipping will be free.
SprezzaBox
SprezzaBox, based in New York, gives you two basic choices. You can subscribe or you can pay for boxes individually. Either way, it’s significantly cheaper than Trunk Club.
A box from SprezzaBox costs $28 for non-members and $25 a month for a 12-month subscriber. If you add up the prices of the contents of each box, the sum is typically over $100. Of all the services like Trunk Club, SprezzaBox offers the most value to their customers and is the most affordable.
Every SprezzaBox package contains several accessories or grooming products — money clips and pocket squares, for example. Better yet, you can be sure that those items were made by some of the world’s top fashion labels.
Stitch Fix
Katrina Lake was attending Harvard Business School when she launched Stitch Fix in 2011. Originally, Katrina represented the company’s entire workforce, and its world headquarters were her apartment. She created all the packages and mailed them herself.
In 2016, Stitch Fix Men debuted. Before that, the brand’s niche was exclusively female customers.
Like Trunk Club, Stitch Fix asks you to fill out an online profile so a stylist can curate packages for you. Once a Stitch Fix box arrives on your doorstep, you have three days to return what you don’t wish to keep.
What’s unique about this service are the relationships that can develop between stylists and clients. You can chat directly with your stylist on the internet and really get to know him or her. If you don’t feel yourself connecting with your initial stylist, you can request to work with someone else. After a while, this person will have a keen sense of what you like, and your packages will suit your tastes with even greater precision.
Any of the subscription services like Trunk Club described above have the potential to suit your individual desires. They vary in areas like pricing, delivery frequency and return policy and they all offer beautiful products. Each provides you with the luxury of a personal stylist to give you items that you would never have picked out for yourself. Those parcels should brighten your day when they arrive and brighten your wardrobe for a long time thereafter.
