At one point in time, it felt as if every blog and newsletter started with an apology for not posting. Most people probably didn’t notice our 18-month disappearance, but some of you did and wondered what was going on and when we’d be back.
This is the story of what happened to the UK’s first stationery subscription box.
How it started
Back in 2012, having worked together in libraries, we bumped into each other on a rail replacement service, had the idea for a stationery subscription box and decided to start Ink Drops.
Just because we loved stationery and were excited at the idea of finding amazing things to share every month. Our first box shipped in November 2012, and our idea turned out to be lots of fun and lots of work.
How it went
Roll on eleven years to early 2024 and we were both feeling a bit burnt out. Despite our best efforts, we were barely covering our costs and that didn’t include a wage for either of us. We were putting in hours every evening and at weekends to source cool stock, pack orders and promote what we were doing.
While some subscription services thrived in the pandemic, other than a small surge of subscriptions in the first weeks of lockdown, that wasn’t the case for us. Our costs were going up all the time, we’d lost all our European customers due to Brexit and had only raised our prices once in 10 years.
We’d reached a point where it became clear that we had three choices:
- Put our prices up massively (and probably lose most of our remaining customers)
- Reduce what went in our monthly mailings so that we weren’t making a loss (this didn’t work out well – Temu means that people think things are a lot cheaper than they actually are)
- Say that 11 years was enough and that it might be time to step back.
We were all set to go with option 1.
Then we began to look at what we needed to put into place and it just felt overwhelming. We’d had a few less-than-pleasant emails accusing us (wrongly) of buying from Temu and similar sites, and ripping customers off. It felt like it was time to take a break. So we closed the subscription service with plans to take a few months off and see how we felt.
We’re not the first to take this path. During the 11 years we were operating a number of subscription boxes for both stationery and cards suddenly disappeared. Paperchase shut up shop. In more recent weeks, we’ve seen Irregular Choice pause to consider their options.
How it’s going
A year passed. Then, as this summer came to an end, we began to get that September stationery feeling again and wondered if it was time to talk about Ink Drops again. We read our old blog posts and were surprised by the joy in our words. Over bowls of chips and pots of tea, we recalled what we’d loved about it in the first place.
Ink Drops started in a very different world. A time when vintage and twee were all the rage. A golden age of personal blogs. The rise of Substack and longer-form content has given us hope once again. Planner and stationery content once again feels joyful.
So this is what Ink Drops will look like going forward:
We’ve reopened our online shop for at least a few months to see how it goes. Ink Drops still has lots of lovely stock. As ever, the idea of items that are lovely, useful or both fills us with delight. The idea of sending out parcels of stationery to kindred spirits is still a wondrous thing.
We want to blog more often about our stationery-related adventures and bring back some of our productivity experiments – reclaiming the joy which led us to start a stationery business & blog in the first place.
Our newsletter will be back, but we’re planning on a move to Substack in the new year.
We want to start sharing more of our ‘my life in stationery’ interviews and finally get our “desk of the year” award off the ground.
And we’ll see where this new version of Ink Drops takes us!
Are you with us?