Episode 81: Introducing Customers to Cool Products with Jared Hales, Chief Technology Officer at Bespoke Post

In this week’s episode of Subscriptions: Scaled, we speak with Jared Hales, Chief Technology Officer at Bespoke Post. Bespoke Post is a subscription box company that aims to introduce customers to cool products. Most of the time, these products come from small, under-the-radar brands.

Keep reading to learn more about Bespoke Post and how the brand operates.

Bespoke Post

Bespoke Post was launched in 2011 by co-founders Rishi Prabhu and Steve Szaronos. The pair first targeted the subscription box toward men. The first box was whiskey-themed.

The brand has expanded over the years but the subscription box is still the bread and butter of the company. Today, Bespoke Post has a full ecommerce shop stocked with thousands of items. The brand also has its own private label brands that sell both in the shop and through the subscription box.

While most members are men, today, the subscription box isn’t just marketed toward men.

Jared Hales

Jared has been at Bespoke Post for eight years. He was hired when the company moved into its first offices. Jared was the eleventh employee, so the company was still relatively small at the time.

In the early stages, it was easy to collaborate with a small team. The company is much bigger today, with around 80 to 90 employees.

Jared’s first title at Bespoke Post was as lead engineer, then he only had one engineer working under him. He was replacing the former founding engineer who had helped build the initial MVP.

Building Bespoke Post

Jared wasn’t present for the initial conversation when Bespoke Post decided to build its own ecommerce platform. While the company has always been subscription-based, it was envisioned that it would have an ecommerce branch. 

Bespoke Post has two different shopping models. One is subscription-based, while the other has a more traditional shopping cart experience such as that of Amazon or Spotify.

Back in the early days of Bespoke Post, some solutions were available for recurring subscription charges. However, none of the available solutions was a right fit for the company. Likewise, back then, many of the ecommerce platforms and tools were strictly for ecommerce and used the traditional shopping cart.

The team realized that if they adopted one of these options they would have to use a ton of custom code, so instead, they decided to build their own platform. This was a huge challenge in the initial stages when there was so much to do. 

Bespoke Post now has a system that was built from the ground up and with the brand’s needs in mind. In this way, the team has been able to build upon and grow the platform in a responsible way while keeping the code clean. 

Around early 2013, Bespoke Post started using the Ruby on Rails software which is still used today.

The Bespoke Post Model

The Bespoke Post model is unique. One thing that differentiates it from many other subscription companies is that the subscribers have complete control over their box. 

Bespoke Post doesn’t ship items to customers unless they have first been approved. The company assigns items to subscribers and announces the delivery ahead of time. Customers can  look at their assigned box and have five days to decide if they want it or not.

During those five days, the customer can choose to keep what’s been assigned to them or skip the entire month for free. They can also swap items out, or even add to the subscription.

For example, if a customer sees a lot of items they like, they can choose two or three boxes that month. They can also add products to their box from the ecommerce shop. 

This is great for the customer experience because they can choose what they receive.

The Bespoke Post subscription box works on an opt-out basis. Shipments are like an open order that customers can modify. In many ways, it’s similar to a shopping cart. Customers are free to add and remove items as they please. 

There’s a lock point in time. Once the box hits that lock point, it can no longer be modified. At this stage, the box gets queued for billing. As soon as the credit card is billed successfully, shipment is made to the customer. 

So if customers want to make a change to their order, they must make a proactive decision. Some customers like the surprise element and allow the box to run on autopilot. In these cases, the customer will sign up and simply tell Bespoke Post what kinds of items they like in the first instance. They may not log in again, or even pay much attention to their subscription.

Other people are very proactive about managing their subscriptions. They’ll pick their items every month, carefully considering what they want.

Bespoke Post believes that giving customers control helps make them stick around.

Billing

Bespoke Post starts billing and shipping boxes out after the fifth of each month. But since fulfillment can be pretty complicated, this is usually spaced out to between one to two weeks. However, it usually ends up being around ten days and sometimes much faster.

The warehouse will start building and shipping boxes. They do this in waves. There’s an operations team who coordinates and schedules everything.

Bespoke Post During COVID-19

During Covid-19, Bespoke Post went through some rapid changes. After the initial scare at the beginning of the pandemic, they put on a hiring freeze. But they were fortunate to be well-positioned for the business to take off.

There are a couple of things that helped Bespoke Post during the pandemic. One is that they have a multi-category offering, so there are a lot of subscription boxes and ecommerce products to choose from. That meant, that if one type of product wasn’t selling well during the pandemic, others would be. They were fortunate that items in some of their categories took off. For example, products involved with the home, kitchen, and bar. 

Then when people started venturing out again, hiking and camping, those related products started doing well too. While these types of products have been popular in the past, they were even more so during Covid.

As a result, Bespoke Post has experienced phenomenal growth during the past couple of years. Now, as travel is picking up, many travel-related products are starting to sell well.

With their growing success, we can’t wait to see what else the future holds for Bespoke Post.

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