Mantry founder Reggie Milligan on the rise and fall of subscription box companies

While literally hyperbole, there is some truth to his claim. Milligan is the founder and CEO of Mantry, a male-targeted food subscription box. Mantry, which is available in the U.S. and features up-and-coming American brands, has been around since 2012 — it experienced the precipitous rise of subscription boxes and its fast decline. But the company is still around, still seeing growth and has some plans for expansion.

Milligan, a Canadian entrepreneur, joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the rise and fall of the subscription box industry. He was one of the first in the space, and Mantry got prime media placements in magazines like GQ and shows like Good Morning America. But in 2017, he said, “the bottom fell out.”

While Mantry has received acquisition offers over the years, he’s focused on continuing to bootstrap the company and still sees growing demand — especially during gift-giving seasons. And Milligan also believes that while his business won’t become a billion-dollar unicorn, the subscription brands that focused on profitability and speaking directly to their customers are the ones that can be around for decades.

“A lot of the smaller bootstrapped ones that were always profitable along the way kind of stuck it out,” he said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Why Mantry was always focused on the U.S. market
“We just never wanted to do Canada. I mean, Canada logistically is like a nightmare for e-commerce. It’s changed a little, but it’s a huge country — the population centers are very small, shipping is expensive, it’s a headache. We were always just like: get to America. I lived in America previously. I knew that was the play. So we just made that the focus.”

How subscriptions businesses survived the bottom falling out
“The bottom fell out. I’d say around like 2017 is when you really started to see [subscription businesses] cool off. You’d reach out to people… you’d be talking to somebody about a business, and they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, wasn’t that a thing a couple years ago?’ And you’d be sitting there, as a founder, and be like, ‘Oh no.’ Like, am I just on a downward trend of an industry? But what ended up happening is: a lot of the bigger funded companies that had built themselves to really big sizes but weren’t profitable, they kind of ran out of funding, and they couldn’t raise more, so they kind of went away. So some of these bigger people that used to occupy the space kind of disappeared. And a lot of the smaller bootstrapped ones that were always profitable along the way kind of stuck it out.”

Mantry’s focus on sustainable growth
“I don’t have any visions that it’s going to, like, double unless we were to go out and raise money and put a couple million straight up into marketing — into Facebook and Instagram, Tiktok ads. But I’ll be honest: I’ve never felt 100% comfortable that the ROI is there with that strategy for the long term. I think you see a lot of companies that do that — they spend the money, they never build sustainable growth, and they kind of blow up. So, yeah, it’s just finding different brands that we can put under the [Mantry] umbrella. And then the other thing that we do is we have started working with different makers and different brands that focus on guys to run campaigns for them to our audience.”