rket. Started in May, Red Paw Paw has had to place its operations on hold to keep up with the demand of its 10,000 members. “The digital era is catching up with sampling,” Brendan O’Mahoney, director and co-founder of Red Paw Paw, said. “We can be very targeted about who we send our products to, and then it’s 10 times more effective than just handing out product blindly on the street corner.” Red Paw Paw, which distributes a handful of sample sized grocery items each month, will relaunch with a new logistics partner next month. It will also increase the cost of its service from $5 a month to $10. Having already teamed with brands such as Nestle, Kellogg’s, and SPC, O’Mahoney says the company is in talks with other brands looking to take advantage of the highly targeted model. “We’ve had a fantastic consumer response and we’ve almost got as many people on a waiting list at the moment. “We’re really quite sophisticated in the way that we break down the data of our members. “We profile all our members and their households when they sign up and try to target the product to the needs of that particular household. “We know that around 40 per cent of our database has a dog, and around 60 per cent are interested in weightloss, so if a grocery brand has either of these products it can become really targeted marketing for them.” Box full of beauty One of the first subscription boxes to launch in Australia was beauty box business, BellaBox, based on a similar beauty concept in the US. Founded by sisters Emily and Sarah Hamilton in 2011, BellaBox has accumulated tens of thousands of members across Australia for its $15 monthly delivery service. Bellabox also operates in Singapore, and has average growth of 13 per cent month on month across its entire operations. “The first adopters of Bellabox in Australia were those that knew about the beauty box concept globally,” Sarah Hamilton told Inside Retail PREMIUM. BellaBox, which has more than 500 beauty partners, offers members between five and 10 beauty and lifestyle products each month based on a member’s profile. There can be up to 30 different versions of boxes sent to customers each month, with some months based on particular themes, such as travel. Members are surveyed after receiving packages, and are encouraged to share their recommendations online or through social media. “When you sign up you fill out a beauty profile questionnaire and that tells us a little bit about you – from standard demographic questions to going out on a Friday night.” Hamilton says BellaBox’s sample value far exceeds the monthly membership fee of $15, with the main aim to turn members into consumers. “Customisation is very important to us, but the box is not about creating the perfect box for you, it’s as much as about trying to get you to experiment with new products. “For the brands it’s a marketing platform – having only a sample size in the box allows customers to still to go out and choose products in a retail environment. “We’ve seen quite a few [beauty box companies] come and go. At the moment we have one main competitor and then there’s two other smaller players in the market. “There’s definitely players that are coming into different verticals, and we keep an open dialogue with them, but for us right now we’re focusing on the beauty box.” BellaBox will launch a new look website later this month with a greater focus on customisation and customer reviews. “We tried to not just look at our market but also around the world for the best websites. We did a huge amount of user testing to see exactly what people wanted. “Bellabox is constantly evolving and it’s a really exciting place to work. We keep one eye on the competition and the other at looking at different ways of how we can improve the customer experience.”