subscription-commerce
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DAILYLOOK puts the fitting room in your living room.
The Los Angeles styling service learned that selling an outfit and helping someone get dressed are different businesses. Its turning point came in a box.
Mars Men built a repeat order before it raised a round
A testosterone-support subscription became a business with a reported $100 million revenue run rate. Now Mars Men is taking its formula for repeat purchases into retail and cognitive performance.
Ohi put the warehouse next door. That was the shortcut.
A tiny Manhattan warehouse held a large idea: give independent brands rapid delivery by moving their inventory into the neighborhood. Ohi’s experiment shows why the shortest journey can require the most careful planning.
Smalls built a big business by thinking only of cats
Fresh food was the opening move. Smalls turned the overlooked cat owner into a customer worth courting - then took its subscription-born brand onto pet-store shelves.
Bespoke Post sells discovery. The box was only the beginning.
A failed advertising idea became a monthly introduction to small brands. Now Bespoke Post is following its customers beyond the box, into a store with a taste of its own.
Spot & Tango made four months of dog food. It lasted four days.
UnKibble turned a freezer-space complaint into a pantry-friendly subscription. Then Spot & Tango had to learn how to make enough of it.
CaaStle rented the wardrobe. Then it lost the trust.
CaaStle gave fashion brands a way to rent their own clothes without running the laundry. Its collapse reveals how a useful retail idea became entangled with a financial fiction.
Cindy Gustafson Built Her Career in the Space Between the Product and the Person
Before she ran Nutrafol, Cindy Gustafson spent two decades learning how brands earn attention. Her CEO chapter is a study in restraint: fewer products, closer listening and growth built around what customers actually need.
Thad Tarkington Found a Business Hiding in the Air Filter
A ruined Saturday suggested a subscription. The stranger clue came later: customers ordering filters for dozens of homes, pointing two college founders toward a much larger problem.
Michael Flynn and the Sixth Try That Kept the Bags Unpacked
Before Recharge became the machinery behind billions in recurring commerce, its technical co-founder was nearly packed for home. Six product experiments, one useful problem, and five bootstrapped years changed the itinerary.
Nicolas Capuono and the Business of the Moment After Buy
The DAILYLOOK chief executive built his career in the unglamorous minutes after checkout - where a return, a late parcel or one useful conversation can decide whether a customer ever comes back.
Wonderful makes the pretty part work
Behind the jewelry, supplements, and nonalcoholic beer is an agency doing the unglamorous work of digital commerce: fixing subscriptions, taming catalogs, and making a brand easier to buy.
Greg Alvo Bet on the Purchase You Never Have to Remember
In 2010, three major online retailers offered product subscriptions. Greg Alvo built Ordergroove for the day the rest of commerce would catch up - and spent the next 16 years turning convenience into infrastructure.
Daniel Broukhim Put the Gift Bag on a Balance Sheet
FabFitFun began as a newsletter, found its business model in the event gift bag, and grew by treating surprise as an operating system. Daniel Broukhim’s career is a study in pivots, partnership, and the unglamorous math behind a delightful box.
Madison Reed Gave Away 7,000 Boxes - Then Built a Hair-Color Habit People Would Pay For
Amy Errett spent heavily to make salon-grade color feel safe at home, discovered that free customers rarely return, and turned the lesson into an omnichannel beauty business built around guidance, repetition and trust.
Because Built a DTC Brand for Bladder Leaks. Then Its Customers Sent It Back to the Drugstore.
The founders used family experience, phone calls and repeat orders to redesign an awkward category. The clever part was not staying online - it was knowing exactly when to put the product back on a shelf.
The Company Betting Your Next Purchase Is Already Yours
Ordergroove sells brands a simple, expensive idea: the cheapest customer to acquire is the one who already bought. Here is how a company started in a Manhattan apartment built the plumbing behind the subscribe-and-save button.
Kogan Built a Checkout Aisle That Never Ends
The Melbourne retailer began by cutting the middlemen out of television sales. Twenty years later, its more revealing product is the customer relationship itself - reused across a marketplace, membership and a shelf of everyday services.
HelloFresh Put Dinner on Autopilot. Now It Wants the Rest of the Kitchen
The lime-green box solved the 6 p.m. question with portioned ingredients and a recipe card. Fifteen years later, HelloFresh is trying to turn that weekly habit into an operating system for what households eat.
AG1
AG1 built a reported $600 million business by turning a scoop of green powder into a morning ritual. Now the company that preached one product, one channel and one flavor is testing how far that ritual can stretch.
Jens Nicolaysen
Jens Nicolaysen is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Shinesty, the Boulder, Colorado apparel brand whose stated mission is to force the world to take itself less seriously. A 2010 marketing graduate of CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, he spent his early career doing brand strategy and innovation consulting for large consumer companies before launching Shinesty in mid-2014 with fellow Leeds alum Chris White. The company began as a vintage-clothing resale operation with buyers scouring thrift shops in college and ski towns, pivoted to original designs in 2015, and grew into a direct-to-consumer underwear and loungewear business best known for its trademarked Ball Hammock pouch underwear, its holiday and theme-party outfits, and a joke-first marketing voice that Nicolaysen oversees across email, paid media, catalogues and video. Shinesty's story became a six-episode MTV2 series in 2017, the company was named an Inc. 5000 honoree in 2022, and it has raised roughly $8.2 million through a Series A.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Prado
Prado is an Austin-based Food-as-Medicine platform that lets clinicians prescribe medically tailored meals and lets patients pay for them with pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars. It stitches together the parts that usually don't talk to each other - a compliant Letter of Medical Necessity, HIPAA- and IRS-approved checkout, white-label storefronts, and fulfillment - so healthy prepared food becomes both prescribable and reimbursable. Founded in 2020 by former Snap Kitchen CEO Jon Carter, Prado has supported the sale of more than 25 million meals and connects food operators to a network of 70M+ tax-advantaged account holders.
Katie Spies
Katie Spies is the founder and CEO of Maev, the direct-to-consumer brand that made human-grade raw food for dogs a subscription. An MIT-trained engineer who quit tech to spend nearly a year as a full-time dog walker, she built Maev after her rescue dog's health turned around on a raw diet. Since launching in 2020 she has shipped millions of meals, raised roughly $19 million in venture funding, and grown the company by wheat-pasting posters across New York before scaling to paid channels.
Sticky.io
Sticky.io is a San Francisco-based revenue optimization platform for high-volume subscription and ecommerce brands. Built on an intelligent payments engine, it pairs a headless CRM, a conversion-focused checkout and funnel builder, AI-driven payment recovery, and orchestration across 160+ gateways. The platform supports roughly 72 million subscriptions and processes more than $12 billion in transactions annually, helping merchants reduce silent churn and recoup failed payments.
Daniel Saks
Daniel Saks is the co-founder and CEO of Landbase, a San Francisco agentic-AI company building GTM-1 Omni, an action model purpose-built to automate B2B go-to-market work. He previously co-founded and co-led AppDirect, the subscription-commerce platform that became a unicorn. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and McGill graduate, Saks traces his obsession with helping small businesses survive to his family's century-old furniture store in Niagara Falls, which closed during the Great Recession.
Shauna Drumright
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
AppDirect
AppDirect is a San Francisco-based B2B subscription commerce platform that connects technology providers, advisors, and businesses so they can buy, sell, and manage software, hardware, connectivity, AI, and energy services in one place. Founded in 2009, it powers white-label marketplaces for telecom giants and enterprises, and is assembling an 'Everything Store' for B2B technology through a rapid string of acquisitions.
Nicolas Desmarais
Nicolas Desmarais is the chairman and co-CEO of AppDirect, the San Francisco-based B2B subscription commerce platform he co-founded with Daniel Saks in 2009 out of an apartment at age 23. AppDirect now powers digital marketplaces for thousands of providers across software, telecom, energy, hardware and AI, has raised roughly $750M, and most recently unveiled an AI-led 'everything store' for B2B procurement.
Hayley Barna
Hayley Barna is a General Partner at First Round Capital and co-founder of Birchbox, the subscription beauty pioneer that invented an entirely new retail category. After growing Birchbox from a Harvard Business School idea to a 200-person company with over a million monthly subscribers, she joined First Round Capital in 2016 as its first female partner and was promoted to General Partner in 2017. She brings a rare founder-operator lens to early-stage investing, with a portfolio spanning healthcare, consumer, and commerce companies including Alma, Thirty Madison, Studs, Mirror, and Clare. A finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search who once worked at IBM's research lab at age 16, Barna is equal parts scientist, builder, and storyteller - one of the most distinctive investor voices in New York's startup ecosystem.