Quarterly Co., A Subscription Service For Receiving Wonderful Things

Quarterly Co. is one of the coolest subscription services to come down the pipeline. Here’s how it works: you sign up to receive tangible items from a contributor of your choice and every three months, you get interesting things snail-mailed to you. The list of contributors and what they will mail out is impressive. For example, Jesse Thomas, CEO and founder of JESS3, will be packaging up “awesome stuff I find in my travels around the world, and a background on the product.” Maria Popova of Brain Pickings is also a contributor and she plans to send out “some of humanity’s most intriguing and unusual efforts to order the chaos, artifacts that tickle your curiosity and quench it at the same time, a layer of fascination that makes reality both more interesting and more digestible.” Also, each mailing has its own “unique hashtag…so you can follow its progress on Twitter.”

Quarterly is a new way to connect with the people you follow and find interesting. We spend so much of our lives connecting with people online that we forget the value of tangible interactions that happen in the real world. Quarterly wants to bridge that gap by allowing anyone to subscribe to influential contributors and get physical items in the mail from them. It is like a magazine, but instead of receiving words on a page, our subscribers receive actual items that tell a compelling story crafted and narrated by the contributor.