Candy Japan - (Bi)Monthly Mystery Box Club

[twissie]

First post of 2015! Welcome to the future, everyone~ Let's bust out those hover boards and hang out!

Last year (hurrhurr) bergeronprocess made me aware that monthly mystery box clubs have made a comeback. After researching a couple, I decided to go with Candy Japan, which has been a huge success for me so far. It's a club that sends out care packages of random

Comments

[siberian_angel]

Color me surprised, I've never heard of monthly mystery box clubs.
Now I kind of want to participate. *lol*

[twissie]

Really? I always thought the horse book club I subscribed to when I was younger was originally a German thing XD;;;; solely based on the fact that most of the books we received were set in Germany (as far as I remember). Hahahaha.

You should look them up! I'm afraid I don't remember what the most popular ones are called ^^; there are clubs that send out monthly food items (like Candy Japan), but there are also clubs that focus on skin care/make up products, some focus on books, and there are also clubs for hobby things - tanvan talks about Lootcrate below, which send out geeky collectibles.

I'm sure there's a club out there for you if you want to join one! :)

[siberian_angel]

That does sound awesome and I'll definitely take a gander if I can find something similar around here.

[tanvan]

We're signed up for Lootcrate.

Pros: Some exclusive merch, December had a "BatmanJoker" Pop Vinyl figure, only available with them. And an exclusive batman comic. I've liked their t-shirts.

Cons: Shipping has been hit and miss, they try to have deliveries land at your door between the 20th and 25th of every month, mine have always been a little late, so it has been hard to avoid spoilers for what we're getting. Sometimes international orders are very early or very late. Also, their customer service is so backlogged that it might take 4-5 days to get a human response if there are problems.

Recommendation: Don't subscribe. Instead, look for spoiler's and unboxings decide if you want the contents of that specific box. They offer a gift service, just order one of those when it has what you want.

[twissie]

Lootcrate was one of the first clubs I looked at. I ended up not subscribing, mostly because I'm not much of a collector. Collectibles are nice, but they take up so much space ^^; Spoiling the content and then ordering a specific box based on the content sort of defeats the whole purpose of a monthly mystery box club for me. I guess I'd be more into it if I collected the collectibles they offer :)

That's a shame about their customer service being slow, but I guess it means they're popular and keeping very busy!

[tanvan]

Yeah. We're still subscribed. I figure the t-shirts are worth it to us. I'm looking at others that might be better for us, Nerdblock maybe. I like the suprise too, unfortunately it's hard to avoid spoilers if your box comes late and you follow the company on twitter.

[twissie]

Yeah, I was tempted to subscribe just for the t-shirts too!!! A monthly mystery t-shirt club would be awesome. Or socks! Or even underwear! Hahahhaha 8D; Useful too, I always forget to buy socks for myself.

[awakenyourfaith]

Nice! :)

[kehlen]

Oh, yes. We are totally 30 years into the future this year! No flying cars though :-)

[kehlen]

I have never been in such clubs, and only have once participated in a secret Santa exchange. It was a lot of fun.

[twissie]

Secret Santa is fun, but I'm terrible at finding good gifts for people, and for complete strangers it's even worse! I've signed up for Secret Santa at a forum a couple of times, and that turned out fine, mostly because I knew what the people there are interested in and would like to receive xD;;;

We have Secret Santa at my office too, but I've never signed up for it ^^;;;;;;;

[kehlen]

The Secret Santa I participated in was for an LJ community where we all knew each other quite well, so it wasn't for strangers.

Now I remember that I did it several years before in a larger community, and it was both easier because of the lack of expectation to guess exactly right, and harder because I wanted to.

[thistle_chaser]

I had really good luck with http://graze.com. I had to leave them for diet reasons, but before that they were really worth the money.

In pre-net days, I was in some kind of monthly "samples" club: For $20 or so, they'd send you a whole bunch of "free" samples. That was not such a good value, heh.

That's about the grand total of my 'monthly box' experience.

[twissie]

I've heard good things about Graze, but I get a very corporate-y feel when I look at their site, and it makes it slightly off-putting for me. Not sure why!

[thistle_chaser]

Agreed, it does now. It advertises on primetime TV! Originally it felt small and very personal. I guess that's a measure of their success...