End of an Era ♡ Big changes coming to WhimsyMail & WhimsyBox
Hello, whimsical darling! I’m making some big changes to my monthly subscription offerings and wanted to do a longer form post for those of you interested in my reasoning behind it. The short answer: I’m burnt out, stressed out, and this current model is no longer serving me. It’s time to shake things up and make room for new creative adventures!
But first, let’s flashback to 2017…
Four years ago, my husband and I both lost our jobs on the same day due to the company downsizing. This was not my first time being laid off. (Not my second time either. Joining the workforce during a recession was not fun!) Tired of not feeling in control of my own employment, I was determined to make my tiny little online sticker shop I had started as a hobby into my main source of income... which seemed impossible. At the time, Lace & Whimsy was barely bringing in enough monthly income to cover my car payment. But I wanted to give it a shot! The idea of being a full time creative sounded like “My Dream Job” (although I do not dream of labor).
I decided to try offering a monthly envelope of stickers (aka “WhimsyMAIL”) as a monthly reward tier on my Patreon. People seemed to like it! So a few months later, I added the option of a WhimsyBOX for my patrons who wanted even more goodies per month. I eventually moved my physical subscription offerings over to my website, as Patreon’s interface ended up not being a great fit. Plus, I’m not a fan of giving Patreon a percentage of my sales each month!
October 2018
October 2019
My subscriptions kept growing and growing, mainly thanks to word of mouth! The sticker community on Instagram is truly delightful. Many of my customers routinely share photos of their WhimsyMail / WhimsyBox subscriptions as they arrive and tag my account, sending new babes my way. I didn’t pay a dime for advertising because I didn’t have to! I had steady, sustainable growth simply from my wonderful subscribers helping to spread the word. The boxes started to really take off in February 2019 when I released my “Cosmic Unicorns” themed box. I doubled my subscriber count for the boxes in one month!
As the subscription side of my shop grew, my monthly income became much more steady and predictable. Even during months where the sales volume was lower for orders placed in the shop, the subscriptions ensured I at least made enough to cover my costs and pay my bills. Eventually, I couldn’t keep up with production on my own. It’s hard to really focus on getting anything else done when you have to stop every 5-10 minutes to reload the sticker cutting machines! My husband Chris quit his job so he could help me with production and fulfillment. He’s now even better at working the cutting machines than I am. Plus he handles fulfilling most of the orders placed in the shop, packaging up wholesale orders, helping me with copywriting, and has been an all around huge help. Having that help really freed me up to create new art and focus more on continuing to grow the business! If you’ve had your hands on a sticker sheet from Lace & Whimsy within the past year, there’s a 99% chance Chris was the one who made it and packaged it.
Last year, I even added a Luxe version of WhimsyBox with way more stickers and extra goodies after a few customers specifically requested it. Things were going great!
May 2020 was my best month ever for subscriptions. Likely thanks to the first round of pandemic stimmy $$$ (Trickle UP economics, am I right??) ♡
enter burnout
I’m not sure exactly when it started, but gradually the monthly cycle of create-manufacture-package-ship-repeat started to really get to me. Living through a global pandemic sure hasn’t helped. I’ll spare you the details of my various mental and physical health challenges I’ve been dealing with the past few years, but balancing my monthly subscription schedule with caring for my basic needs has been A LOT.
Also, I don’t have time to really work on anything else. Every time I shift my attention to doing a shop update or working on projects not related to the subscriptions, I fall behind. The past couple months, Chris has had to pep talk me through every step of getting subscriptions done (and my goodness, there are a lot of steps). It always feels impossible.
But then I always get it done! And I’m always so proud of the monthly collections I release. I’m good at it, my customers love it, and it’s making me money, so why walk away from that?
Well, mainly because the subscriptions have been making me feel like this GIF…
We’ve thought long and hard about what kind of changes we could implement to make things simpler and eventually came to the decision that subscriptions in their current form are just not sustainable moving forward. During the pandemic, my subscriber counts have gone down while the sales in the shop are higher than ever. Subscriptions make up less than half of our monthly income, yet take up what feels like 95% of my attention and energy. I tend to be a people pleaser and really hate the idea of taking away a subscription many of you love so much that you’ve been subscribed for months or even years. It still blows me away that many of my subscribers have supported me for such a long time and it means so much to me!
Recently, I really sat with the idea of changing things up. I opened my journal and made a list of the projects I would pour myself into if my subscription deadlines were out of the picture. Projects like creating a tarot deck or affirmation deck that I’ve wanted to do for years! I was amazed how quickly I filled up pages with ideas for things I wanted to create. There are so many projects I’ve been able to start and work on for a few days, then have to pivot back to working on subscriptions. I lose so much momentum when I can’t allow myself to dive right into a project that’s exciting me at that moment!
My subscriptions helped Lace & Whimsy grow and evolve into what it is today, but I can’t shake the feeling that at this point, they are actually holding me back from taking things to the next level.
So, now what?
For starters, April will be the final month of WhimsyMail & WhimsyBox in their current form.
A note to current subscribers… If you’re subscribed through my site, which most of you are, you don’t need to do a thing. I’ll cancel your subscription for you before the May billing cycle begins. (If you’re one of my original babes still subscribed via Patreon from way back when I offered physical subscriptions there, I’ll be contacting you through Patreon about what you need to do.)
The final batch of subscriptions will ship at the end of April, after which I’ll rest and regroup, make some updates to the shop, and prepare for a new chapter. The shop will still be open so you can get your à la carte sticker fix any time you’d like!
Reimagining WhimsyBox
As you may have already guessed from this blog post, I will no longer be offering WhimsyBox as a monthly subscription. It has just become too all-consuming. The stress and logistics of always thinking about the next several collections at once and making sure that my products manufactured by third parties (like enamel pins and notebooks) are going to be ordered and arrive on time has just become too much for me to handle. I’d rather create collections with more intention and have the time to illustrate more detailed pieces for them rather than always hustling to keep up with deadlines. Instead of choosing products based on what I can order that will arrive on time, I want to be able to take the time to choose the best products for each collection.
That said, WhimsyBox as a concept isn’t going anywhere. I will still be creating boxes several times a year that will be available to order individually. Basically, I’m reimagining WhimsyBox as a product rather than a monthly subscription. I’d also like to revisit some of my favorite WhimsyBox themes and re-release limited quantities of them so that there are always a few different themed WhimsyBoxes available for purchase in the shop at any given time. This also gives me the flexibility to curate boxes at price points outside the one-size-fits-all pricing structure of the WhimsyBox subscription!
It’s possible I may relaunch WhimsyBox as a quarterly subscription in the future, but for the moment I want to press pause for a bit to explore my creativity in new ways.
WhimsyMail 2.0
In a couple months, I’ll be relaunching WhimsyMail in a new format. It will be at a price point somewhere between WhimsyMail and WhimsyBox and will only feature sticker sheets — no more art prints or holographic stickers. I want to keep the new format as straightforward as possible and anything we can’t manufacture in-house complicates things!
There will also be less of a focus on new art and designs. Between the sticker sheets currently in my shop and my retired/seasonal designs, I have nearly 200 sticker sheets in my arsenal! There’s so much room to revisit and remix collections, make different color variations of existing designs, and still keep things fresh.
This isn’t to say there won’t ever be new artwork featured in WhimsyMail, there absolutely will be. But I need to take the pressure off so that I have the space to work on other creative projects that are calling to me. My hope is that if I create my art at a less rushed and more intentional pace, I’ll be able to complete more detailed and intricate illustrations that I just don’t have the capacity for with the way things operate right now. Quality over quantity!
The higher price point will allow me to include even more stickers than I do now. I also want to spend more time decorating the envelopes each month and truly make WhimsyMail an absolute delight to find in your mailbox each month. I’m talking envelopes so pretty you almost don’t want to tear them open! I’ve been laying awake the past few nights envisioning ideas and themes for the first few months of WhimsyMail 2.0 and can’t wait to make them a reality.
If you are or have been a subscriber of mine, I am confident you’re going to love this next iteration of WhimsyMail. I’m so excited to relaunch it and have a fresh start, knowing everything I know now about running a subscription business. For starters, I’m going to make sure the billing cycle is more straightforward to avoid any confusion! Stay tuned for details about WhimsyMail’s relaunch. We’re still finalizing what the monthly cost will be and how many sticker sheets will be included but as soon as we work out those details, I’ll let you all know!
These changes are definitely bittersweet and something we agonized over implementing. Chris and I have been so incredibly grateful for your ongoing support these past few years. We are SO EXCITED for this new chapter of Lace & Whimsy and are confident that these changes are going to allow me to create bigger and better things for you! Thank you for following along with my ever-evolving creative journey.
