It’s no secret that the “alternate” subscription market is exploding.
It started with sending stuff. Birchbox offers high-end beauty products; Conscious Box caters to the organic market, including only natural, GMO products; BarkBox sends subscribers a crate-full of dog-related items, and Club W sends bottles of wine.
Then it shifted into doing stuff. A ClassPass subscription gets you unlimited access to group exercise classes and Trveler has roped in the travel market by offering subscriptions to regularly scheduled, planned-by-someone-else spontaneous vacations.
Now Wonderush has entered the subscription market offering something a bit different. They call themselves a “lifestyle” subscription service.
For £29 a month, the UK startup offers subscribers access to nearly unlimited organized activities around London. But like, any activities.
The company handpicks a vast selection of available experiences in London, from chess boxing to oil painting to stand up comedy to mixology. Subscribers can then book as many activities as they want without paying any additional costs or fees.
It’s an extrovert’s dream come true.
The only limitations are that activities must be booked at least seven days in advance and can only be booked once per month (per activity). In other words, you can’t use your Wonderush subscription for 30 straight days of hot yoga.
The potential for growth is enormous. Right now, Wonderush is distinctly, and probably intentionally, aiming at Millennials. While some of their activities could be enjoyed by an older crowd, their marketing feels very Buzzfeed-ish. Take these paragraphs from their blog:
We’re confronted with detailed information about other peoples’ lives all the time, so it’s only natural that we’d want to compare ourselves to everybody. It’s a bit weird, we can all admit that. It is, however, perfectly normal. Whatever gets us through the day, after all. The problem comes when we suddenly start to fear that we’re coming up short.
We’re not going to as many parties and this person, or that person, and we don’t seem to have as many friends as that guy (who you always dismissed as kind of a man-whore anyway, and yet you still find that you care about how many photos he’s tagged in).
From the tone and content of this post, I can only assume that it was written by a 22 year-old in yoga pants while sending a Snapchat message of them sipping #PSL in front of Netflix. And that makes total sense, for the time being.
There is huge potential in expanded, more expensive packages marketed to older customers too. I’m talking vintage wine tasting, high-end concerts, and exorbitant shopping trips – activities for those with large wallets and refined tastes.
For the time being, Wonderush seems to be doing just fine. Although the service is currently only located in London, they have plans to be in other UK cities within 12 months. Hopefully they (or someone like them) starts making big moves in North America.
Click here to see the full list of activities available.
