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Get Acquainted With Vancouver’s Subscription Box: Vancity Box

Vancity Box

 Vancity Box

Vancity Box curates new products from local businesses every month into their subscription-based box service. Each box has up to an $80 retail value of 5-8 local artisan-crafted goods. Past boxes have included items like organic cotton candy, an alcohol infusion kit and hand-poured soy candles.

We chatted to Peter the Managing Director of Vancity Box Inc. about the business:

What is Vancity Box?

We are a subscription box company that features local companies’ products in our box and sends them to our subscribers. This allows our subscribers to try something new every month, learn about hidden gems in our city, and also encourage them to support these local small businesses. We also plan on doing video interviews with these companies in the future so our subscribers to learn more about these local businesses and put a face to them.

 

What sparked the idea?

The idea came to me randomly while I was chatting with a friend about a new business model we heard of; subscription boxes. Subscription boxes have been really popular recently and we were throwing around ideas of what we could do with the subscription box business model. Our first idea was actually to do a beauty box with make-up items but quickly realized that wasn’t something I’d be very passionate about!

So I asked myself; what is something that I would be passionate about? And what are some things that I enjoy doing? Then one day, while I was walking around the marketplace on Granville Island for lunch, I realized that I spend a lot of time in marketplaces, craft fairs, farmers markets, and spending a lot of money on these artisan-crafted products. As an art school graduate, I guess I’ve always had an appreciation for these beautifully crafted products and being an entrepreneur I also had a lot of respect for these small businesses. That was when I knew I wanted to do something to help support local businesses and everything just started to fall into place.

 Vancity Box

 Vancity Box

 

Why is shopping local important?

It is important because it keeps the money in our economy. Buying from local businesses also creates more job opportunities for all of us and it reduces our environmental impact. The most important reason for me, personally, is that it encourages our city’s uniqueness. A big part of what makes this community so amazing are the creative people, the artists, the entrepreneurs, the unique artisan-goodies, and the support that we show for local businesses. Shopping locally encourages our community to stay unique and helps to promote that creativity that makes Vancouver so special.

 

How do you curate your products?

Finding these local businesses and reaching out to them is a pretty easy thing to do in our community because there are always craft fairs and farmers markets going on around the city. If we are not at the fair searching for new products, we are on Etsy shopping for goodies. I guess you could say we are professional shoppers!

We generally have a theme planned out for each month, so we already have an idea of what we are looking for. For example, our December box is a Christmas themed box so we searched for chocolates and we stumbled upon ChocolaTas, a local artisan chocolate company. We shot them an email and they were happy to participate in our #ShopLocal movement.

After we find a few other companies, that fit within the theme and compliment each other’s products, we place an order, pick them up, and carefully package them in our Vancity Boxes. When they’re ready to go, we send them off to our subscribers to enjoy their box of locally-crafted goodies.

 

You can check out Vancity Box on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or visit their website for more information.

 

 

By Amar Mirchandani @amarmirch
Photo: Vancity Box

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