The meteoric rise of services selling carefully curated items by subscription has caught the attention of traditional retailers. Bespoke Post, Trunk Club and Quarterly Co. are each putting a unique spin on the idea of shopping. This hot new trend has a ticketing equivalent - the very popular ThunderTix feature of selling event ticket coupons via email subscription. Here' a quick look at the item subscription trend and how it relates to selling more tickets.
Selling ticket inventory as fast as possible is the goal of all venue owners. Selling item inventory as fast as possible is the goal of just about every retailer on Earth too. That's why the wildly popular new trend of curated goods being sold as a subscription has been getting so much attention lately. Receiving items by mail order subscription may not seem new, but a handful of companies have added a new social twist to the familiar practice by having an influential person choose which items get sent out to subscribers.
Companies like Bespoke Post, Trunk Club and Quarterly Co. have been cultivating rosters of people well-known for their discriminating good taste. These "tastemakers" and "contributors" curate items that they consider noteworthy (exotic coffee, handmade jewelry, etc.) and combine them all into a package that anyone can subscribe to via postal mail. As described on the Quarterly website, the idea is:
We spend so much of our lives connecting with people online that we forget the value of tangible interactions that happen in the real world. Quarterly wants to bridge that gap by allowing anyone to subscribe to influential contributors and receive physical items in the mail from them. It’s like a magazine, but instead of receiving words on a page, our subscribers receive actual items that tell a compelling story crafted by the contributor.
The trend taps into the universal appeal of both a "value add" and storytelling. One may find other mail order subscription services that contain items of equal or greater value, but those lack continuity or a theme, as told by a curator. Being sent a monthly package containing items you may not have had the time (or awareness of) to shop for yourself is special. So special, the mailing lists for Bespoke Post and Quarterly Co. packages has been getting bigger every month. Time (and profits) will tell whether or not big retail chains adopt this practice of having curated items by subscription.
For the very same reasons services like Bespoke Post and Quarterly Co. are popular, so too is the ThunderTix feature of offering ticket coupons by subscription, what we call "Flex Pass."
ThunderTix FlexPass provides your patrons with the flexibility of not having to choose all of their event dates ahead of time by subscribing to a steady stream of coupons. Every time one of your patrons purchases tickets to the Flex Pass event, they will be emailed a unique coupon code that they can use for all the productions that you included with that packaged coupon. As each production becomes available for purchase, your patrons will need to go to the site, choose their desired date, time, and their preferred seats. Then on the checkout page, they’ll enter the unique coupon code for each ticket in their basket.
ThunderTix offers automatic coupon codes that are generated at the completion of an order and sent to the customer in their email receipt. Auto-generated coupons have a face value of 100% off the purchase price of future event(s). Automatic coupons are generated any time a ticket is purchased for an event you specify. The amount of coupon codes received will be equal to the amount of regularly priced tickets purchased.
