This decade’s great subscription box boom has played out like a gold rush, with early prospectors like Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club finding success early and inspiring legions of wannabes: Birchboxes for sex toys, Dollar Shave Clubs for rare meats. Some of them seem like decent ideas, others leave us scratching our heads, and mostly we are content to let the marketplace decide which will have staying power. In theory, a subscription makes the perfect gift: For the gift-giver, it has the benefit of being just as convenient as a gift certificate while seeming more fun and personal. One recent addition of the subscription box fold, however, puts these assumptions to the test.
SinglesSwag—great name, obviously—bills itself as “a fun, stylish monthly surprise for amazing single women,” as opposed to all those pesky subscription box services that only cater to women in couples or to un-amazing single women. How does the company determine whether you’re amazing? And hey, how does it determine whether you’re single? Sounds like a logistical nightmare. So far the company seems to be using social media to target the single and the swag-deficient: The holiday season being upon us, one Slate staffer happened upon advertisements for the service on her feeds over Thanksgiving, breaking the unspoken rule that people do not really like to be reminded that their internet habits are being ruthlessly mined to sell them things, which goes double when your Instagram account has somehow discerned your relationship status. Inc. has recommended Singles Swag, which launched earlier this year, as a “hot holiday gift” for this season.
SinglesSwag’s founder, noted nonwoman Jonathan Beskin, made a “smart play on the market,” according to Inc., by zeroing in on single women. Women, Beskin found, were meme-ing all over the ‘net about being single (presumably with lots of Cathy cartoons and Bridget Jones GIFs), but tragically, no one was making any money off of it: “So he created a product he knew they would want, a box that was all about their single-dom, that catered to their single lifestyle, and that even helped them in the areas of personal growth and relationships.”
“At SinglesSwag we do not subscribe to any societal or cultural expectations on women,” the website declares on its about page. “We believe a woman’s happiness is determined by her outlook and attitude, not by her relationship status.” It’s a pretty strange way to describe a brand founded entirely around defining women by their relationship statuses and assuming that they eventually want to end up in traditional monogamous partnerships. “Never settle.” Yup, single women, once God’s most pathetic creatures, finally have a way to improve their lots in life, thanks to capitalism and the empowering forces of the subscription box wave. Sisters are really doing it for themselves.
What, pray tell, does a subscription box for single women even include? Those sad two-slice packets of bread for when you can’t commit to a whole loaf? Condoms, maybe? Diet pills, teeth whitener? Those chicken cutlet things you stuff in your bra to make your boobs look bigger? Can you include an actual boob job in a subscription box? It might not be in keeping with the trend’s commitment to tangible consumer goods. Um, other stuff women can use to land men … roofies? But like modern, artisanal ones that contain antioxidants? The company could go old-school and save some of the money it collects from each woman to help her build up a dowry.
Sorry, getting carried away there (like Carrie Bradshaw lol)—so far, the boxes have tended to include things like “organic bath and beauty products; fun, trending fashion accessories; delicious artisan-crafted foods; best-selling books,” and other “exciting surprises”—you know, just your basic stuff that only amazing single women can appreciate, so they don’t have to miss out on the aspect of being in a relationship that entails exchanging 5 to 7 full-sized luxury products a month with their significant others. Boxes cost $24.99 or $39.99 a month, presumably based on how desperate you consider yourself.
You may laugh now, but in the future, this will be recalled as the dawn of a new era, the birth of a new dating milestone—and, perhaps, the decline of our species. Soon, women everywhere will be asking themselves of blossoming relationships, “Well, I really like him, but is he worth giving up my SinglesSwag over?” They will decide that no, he is not; the population will plummet; and, as the final remnants of humanity collapse into the dust of our shipping box-littered cities, they’ll shake their fists at the ubiquitous, graffitied motto from the moment before the fall: “Never Settle.”
