Humans Open Boxes (for now)

Six essays about what's being stripped from commerce, this one is about an obvious opportunity.

A recent Sézane delivery came with a canvas tote (the color of my favorite lipstick shade no less), a catalog that reads more like a lifestyle magazine, and a vellum insert with money off my next order that makes a promo feel like a gift. I may never use the offer, but I probably won’t forget it.

And a few days ago, there was a little piece of paper at the bottom of a Pika chicken potpie box. It just has the look of being typed in a farmhouse so I zoomed in. The pie was genuinely very good, and now I know they offer lobster, beef, and shepard’s as well.

The bar for brands standing out in the moment after the sale is so low it barely qualifies as a bar, honestly.

The Magic Window

If you don’t activate a new credit card customer in the first thirty days your P&L will suffer the consequences. Give them something meaningful, a real reason to change their behavior, or you’re in the sock drawer for a rainy day. The loyalty programs, the sign-up bonuses, the tiered rewards: all of it existed because of one hard insight: the relationship doesn’t happen by itself even, often, with a good product. You have to design for it. And, once the window closed, it’s rarely reopened.

There’s a behavioral reason the window matters precisely when it does. Kahneman’s peak-end rule: we don’t remember experiences as averages. We remember peaks and endings.¹ The moment you open something you ordered is not incidental. Done right, it is the ending of the purchase experience: the last strong impression the brand gets to make before the memory sets. The Sézane catalog wasn’t in the box by accident. The Pika insert wasn’t accidental either, even if it looked like it was made by someone’s low-tech grandma. Both were designed to be the things to engage you in a way more meaningful than the thumbs up of a doomscroll.

People have been designing for the post-purchase moment since S&H Green Stamps turned every repeat purchase into a future aspiration. The insight that a customer relationship needs tending is not new. What was new was the data. For the first time, banks could see precisely what a customer was worth at year five and build the activation infrastructure to match at month one. I had no idea how good I had it.

Sorry, Who?

Performance marketing made acquisition feel controllable. You could see the click, attribute the cart, measure the conversion. What happened after was harder to count and easier to defund.² What depleted wasn’t the touchpoints. It was the mental availability and equity — the things that makes someone choose you without a discount code, come back without being re-acquired, feel something when they see the name.

We tried to solve it with a mechanism. Subscription was the answer for a decade: recurring revenue, predictable LTV, a relationship by default. By 2023, three quarters of DTC brands had some form of subscription offering.³ Most found out the hard way that a subscription is not a relationship. It is typically inertia. Churn ran at roughly ten percent a month — the average customer was gone inside a year, perhaps because the product failed, but more likely because a relationship was never built.⁴

True loyalty — the deep, trust-based kind — fell to 29% in 2025. Sixty-five percent of consumers feel genuine affection for fewer than three brands.⁵ Out of however many they've ever bought from. Most brands aren't one of them and defunding the moments that might have changed that is how they got there.

Build, Renovate, Teardown

The real problem isn’t acquisition. It’s re-acquisition. For most brands that sell direct, owned channels — email, SMS, direct — account for a fraction of total revenue. The rest flows through paid. That includes your repeat customers. The ones you already acquired. Testing across thousands of DTC brands finds roughly 40% of retargeting conversions aren’t incremental, meaning the customer was coming back anyway.⁶ You paid for the attribution, not the influence. That’s a poor retention strategy it’s paying twice for the same customer. Most brands are doing it on a loop.

A rough illustration: if your blended customer acquisition cost is $75 and an unactivated customer comes back through a paid channel, you’ve spent $150 to reach someone who already bought from you. A vellum insert like Sézane’s costs cents at scale. A black and white piece of paper like Pika Pies’ costs even less. The upfront investment in an email program amortizes to under $2 per customer at any meaningful volume and under $1 by year two.⁷ Performance marketing costs rise with every bid. Owned infrastructure costs drop with every order. That’s the crossover, and for most brands with any meaningful repeat purchase frequency, the math has already moved.

What the calculation requires is a decision about what kind of problem you have. For some this is a build — the infrastructure was never there. For others it’s a renovation, there are some basics gathering cobwebs without a real strategy. For a few it’s closer to a teardown: the dependencies and gaps are structural and change will take time and will hurt before it helps. None of this is cheap. All of it is less expensive than the alternative.

What’s In Your Box?

There’s one more reason to care about what’s in the box. The purchase moments before it arrives are continuing to collapse in agentic commerce.

In March, Amazon went to federal court to block Perplexity’s Comet AI agent from shopping on its platform. The injunction was granted, then stayed on appeal — the fight is still live. But Amazon’s argument didn’t change: the agent doesn’t see the ads, doesn’t get upsold, doesn’t generate the browsing behavior that feeds a $68.6 billion advertising business.⁸ Amazon’s ad network is a Discovery Tax at platform scale. Perplexity is trying to make it optional. Amazon is right to fight it and about what is at stake.

The agent will keep getting better at buying. Faster, cheaper, more integrated into the places where people decide things. The moments before the purchase — the discovery, the comparison, the slow build of wanting something — will keep compressing. What the agent cannot do, at least not yet, is open the box. It cannot read the insert. It cannot feel the texture of the vellum. It cannot notice that someone wrote the note by hand, or that the design of the card looks authentic. It cannot form the impression that makes a customer come back without being re-acquired.

That moment still belongs to you. To us. To the builders of brands and customer love.

You already know what it costs to buy your own customers back. I’m wondering what you’re going to put in the box. Most haven’t decided it’s worth designing for. The bar is still on the floor. That’s the problem, and it’s also the window.

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Footnotes

¹ Kahneman et al., “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less,” Psychological Science, 1993.

² Binet & Field, “The Long and the Short of It,” IPA, 2013.

³ PipeCandy and Rodeo, “State of DTC Subscriptions,” Retail Dive, 2022.

⁴ Recurly, “Churn Rate Benchmarks,” cited in Marketing Charts. Box-of-the-month subscriptions: 12.71% monthly churn.

⁵ SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index, 2025; Snipp consumer loyalty survey, 2025.

⁶ Measured, “Incrementality Benchmarks,” 2024. Analysis of 1,000+ DTC brands.

⁷ Illustrative figures. Actual CAC, insert production costs, and program costs vary by category and scale.

⁸ Amazon v. Perplexity AI Inc., US District Court N.D. California, 2026; Amazon Q4 2025 earnings.