This one is going out to all you ladies who have contemplated subscribing to Birchbox.com. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Birchbox, it is a subscription service for beauty product samples. You pay $10 a month and you receive a little box that is filled with goodies. This sounds like a dream to a product whore like myself so I signed up.
Well, to be fair, I had signed up before when they launched (over a year ago) when the service was $15 a month. I received one box and then I unsubscribed because it wasn’t worth $15 a month. But they changed the price and I thought that time might have made the service better – especially given that they have raised a total of over $12million in venture capital… I figured that with that kind of capital they would be doing some great things to entice their audience.
Sadly, my initial reaction to the product was pretty much still spot on. The service is still not worth it.
And here’s why.
First of all, I feel that the products that they display on the site homepage are completely misleading. You will notice that they look like very large and nice premium samples featuring Kiehls and Nars.
What you get instead for your $10 is a bunch of crap. In the three sample boxes I received there was nothing that came close to being anything I would remotely use. I would prefer that I don’t pay $10 for their nice packaging and actually get at least 1 product that is worth something. Instead all I ever got was worthless garbage in a nice box. I ended up throwing away every single thing I received from Birchbox. You can see from below that it was a some ugly nail polish appliques, a lash card (wha?!), a 0.07oz lip conditioner, a tiny mascara, a perfume sample and a string “friendship” bracelet which was a special item for their 1 year anniversary. It all seems like stuff that a 10 year old might be thrilled with…
So, the conclusion?
Save your money. Basically you can walk into any department store and ask for samples and you will get the same stuff for FREE. You might as well save your $10 a month for 3 months and buy a real full-sized product where the nice department store people will throw in tons of free samples.
