Club Maniac reached 100 subscribers in one week!

Yes, one week! 

You might be as impressed as us or you might not at all be surprised. But last week Friday, we launched Club Maniac, our quarterly subscription service and member's club. If you want to learn more about it, we made a handy little landing page here for you.

We've been working on this for a while - and nearly shelved the whole thing. In 2022 we did a survey via our email list on whether or not people would be interested in a subscription box in which we'd share new exclusive products as well as build a community of like-minded condiment freaks. 

The replies were somewhat sobering.

The overarching reply was that it wasn't affordable (which is a totally fair point, of course). Just not something people could fit into their budgets even if they wanted to. And that for us was not something we could change easily.
Some people also didn't like the idea of not knowing what would be in a box. Overall there were less than 10 people that said they'd definitely sign up. 

With how much work it takes to actually set up a subscription service (at least if you want it to be good), we put it on the back-burner for about a year. If we were going to do it, we really wanted to make it great, which takes financial investment and a lot of time. Without the enthusiasm of our customers, it just didn't seem like something to dedicate time to as if anyone was going to sign up, it would have to be our existing customers. 

Anyway - come spring 2023 we presented in front of a board at our local council to secure a loan. As often with these things, it took a long time to get to that point, so when we originally pitched for it, we were still thinking of doing Club Maniac, so we had to include it also in our 2023 pitch. Long story short, we secured the money! Which was awesome, but now also meant we had to do Club Maniac.

We still put a lot into it as we wanted it to be good of course - it took 10+ months to get everything sorted: Finding a subscription app supplier on Shopify that could set payment cycles how we needed and didn't charge £500 per month. Sorting all the design elements with our designer Luke. Ordering all the supplies from boxes, flyers, pins, T-Shirts... And of course making the stock for the first box. Then some marketing. 

We got re-enthused with the whole thing ourselves and of course we hoped we'd get more sign-ups than the poll from 2022 suggested. But we never expected what actually happened.

When we launched, we got 50 subscribers in the first day. In the car to work that morning, we were hoping for 20, we said we'd celebrate if we got 25. 

And it just kept going. One week after launching, we hit 100 subscribers. That was our goal for the first 12 weeks. We're over the moon and it just shows how things change in just two years. 

Of course it will slow from here but maybe that's not so bad as we literally ran out of some of the contents of box 1 as we never expected to get this much demand so quickly :D

We look forward to how it's all going to go for box 2 and just wanted to say THANK YOU!!!