SubSummit 2025 provided the ultimate deep dive into subscription commerce — the many things it can do (and the few that it can’t). Session speakers shared so many on-point insights that Retail TouchPoints felt compelled to reshare some of these pearls of wisdom with you.
The path to purchase is a local, not an express: “With digital sales, it’s not a seven-touch conversion path anymore [the former average number of touches needed to lead to a purchase]. Now the average is 14 or 15 touches, and the path to conversion is multi-touch, multi-format and multichannel.” — Vic Catalfamo, Marketing Director, BrainMD
Omnichannel now includes multiple marketplaces: “Connected commerce is giving us the ability to find customers where they want to research and find our products, and that’s a really important thing for Staples. We had been old-school omnichannel — stores and ecommerce — but now customers can find us on a bunch of different marketplaces. In my supply chain role, I need to make sure that we’re giving the right service proposition and customer experience [in all those places], as well as meeting inventory and delivery expectations and the entire post-order experience. We don’t want [customers] to feel that one channel underserves them compared to the others.” — Adam Moriarty, VP of Supply Chain Strategy and Operations, Staples
Carefully curated subscription boxes are equivalent to a store’s endcap: “At FabFitFun we curate quarterly subscription boxes with full-size products in beauty, fashion, fitness and home décor. One inspiration was VIP gifting suites, where you could try the newest, trendiest stuff at celebrity events, and me wondering how I could make that into a consumer experience. So we’re a curator and have to be really good at the discovery piece, but also deliver real value. With FabFitFun, everything you get is at the best price. The boxes have become extremely differentiated, both with natural extensions of what our customers were telling us and also things we were really good at. The result is we have thousands of SKUs each season, and the subscription box is the endcap of the store: it represents the highest-visibility, highest-velocity SKUs in our inventory, but there are thousands of items from thousands of brands [in total].” —Michael Broukhim, Co-founder and Co-CEO, FabFitFun
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Inventory challenges require cross-departmental cooperation and collaboration: “Gaining inventory visibility is very important, and it’s not easy in a world where things are changing so fast. We have a client that has a very successful TikTok Live series, and they saw a massive spike in orders [after a livestreaming event] — it was four to five times their best-case scenario, and they had under-forecasted inventory expectations for online and Amazon. Because the inventory wasn’t synched, there were backorders and mis-ships. What’s best in class now are dashboards with marketing, operations and everyone connected, looking at the same information and all driving toward the customer.” — Dan Coll, Partner, Fulfillment IQ
Defining when the subscription value exchange becomes more meaningful: “Subscriptions are transactional. Memberships are relational.” — Jay Myers, Co-founder, Bold Commerce
Competing successfully means winning out over many other types of subscriptions: “We want to get more share of wallet from consumers, but they’re not looking at my product [home warranty services] versus other similar categories. They’re looking at us versus Netflix and their other subscriptions.” — Sarah Duggan, VP Marketing, Frontdoor
Delivery is about more than just speed: “It’s true that speed is probably the number one customer expectation, but for us it’s also about the quality of what we’re shipping, including how the box itself looks. Is it the right size [for the products it’s holding]? Is it too big, with not enough dunnage [packaging material to keep items from moving around during transit]? Or are the items jammed together [in a box that’s too small]? Providing the right experience for the right sizing of each package is a critical piece.” — Adam Moriarty, VP of Supply Chain Strategy and Operations, Staples
The bar is getting higher for subscription success: “A subscription is a reciprocal commitment. The commitment from the customer is that they’re giving you a high-intent signal that they will continue to be a customer, and the [brand] gets a lot of predictability — and with better predictability, you should be able to deliver more value. But there is some subscription fatigue. At FabFitFun, our audience is women aged 25 to 55, and they are defined by the letter ‘W’: Wealthy Women with kids, Wine drinkers and Whole Wheat fans. [Understanding that audience], we’ve tried to follow natural extensions with FabFitFun, asking ‘Where do we have permission to continue to expand?’ If we’re looking at new businesses or brands, we don’t just want to present this to a captive audience; we want it to be a wedge into a new area. There’s a lot of value in subscriptions, but it’s a high bar and it’s getting higher.” — Michael Broukhim, Co-founder and Co-CEO, FabFitFun
