This blog post is a
little story about an email I had the other day, and to understand why I was so
excited to read this email, you need to understand two things.
The first is that I am
a mahoossive nerd at heart. Sure, I act cool with my indie music taste and the
rad festivals I go to and the edginess of (some of) the clothes that I wear,
but deep down I just want to stick a disc into my Playstation 3 and get lost in
a gloriously nerdy haze of skill points and power ups for hours on end. I watch
nerdy TV shows and I drag Chloe to see nerdy films at the cinema (which she
protests endlessly about but occasionally actually enjoys). I love superhero
films, and have a particular obsession with anything that comes out of Marvel
Studios; from the dizzy heights of the Avengers to the much lower stakes of
Ant-Man via the critically acclaimed Iron Man and the universally panned
Incredible Hulk, I will watch them all with an ear splitting grin etched onto
my face for the full 2 and a bit hour run times.
The second thing that
you need to understand is that last year I worked as a Christmas temp at HMV in
Brighton, which involved the usual sorts of things you would expect from a
retail job like shelf stacking and a handy discount card, but importantly to
this story it included a helluvalot of time spent on the checkouts. Now, as in
any HMV shop worth its salt, the queuing area in the Brighton store was lined
with lots of products that didn’t really fit the mould of CDs/DVDs/Games, but
instead would probably be categorised as merchandise for the CDs/DVDs/Games
that we sold. This covered everything from the One Direction Colouring Book to
the Frozen Castle to the foamy Minecraft Swords to the Breaking Bad Mugs; the
idea being that customers would spend plenty of time looking at these items
whilst queuing and be spurred into making impulse purchases that they wouldn’t
have otherwise made. Well let me tell you, it definitely worked on me! Directly
opposite my checkout at HMV was the “HMV loves Marvel” display. Now, remember
what I said about how nerdy I am? I was spending eight hours a day, six days a
week staring at some pretty cool looking merchandise for all of my favourite
films, which included plenty of things that looked like this:
Mmmmmmm, so much Marvel
Pretty cool, right?
So, there I am at HMV, deciding which Superhero to buy, but by the time I got
paid they’d been taken off the shelves and me being me, I had absolutely no
idea how I could find them again as I couldn’t see what they were called from
where I was. Anyway, some time went by and I stumbled across someone’s blog post
about the Pop In A Box subscription service, and hey whaddayaknow, that’s those
cool Marvel figures that I was talking about!
So what is Pop In A
Box? Well, it’s a pretty cool online subscription service specifically for
expanding your collection of Pop! Vinyls, which are a series of kinda
bobblehead-y figures of characters from all over popular culture. Normally,
Pop! Vinyls are quite expensive and, depending on the figure, can be priced
anywhere from £7 to £30+. Pop In A Box offer a variety of plans where they send
you a number of Pops per month for a maximum of £8.49 per pop per month (plus
P&P), and you can choose the subscription size to suit your budget. What I
really like about Pop In A Box though is the collection tracker tool, which
allows you to add the Pops you own, and (more importantly) select the ones you
want or don’t want. Pop In A Box will then send you figures from your “Want”
list (without sending you one that you already have) and will ignore the ones
that you don’t want; plus if for some reason they don’t have any that you want
in stock, they won’t charge you for that month.
A couple of pretty cool TV shows represented by pretty cool Pop! Vinyl figures (Images from thinkGeek)
I love Pop In A Box,
and am getting very excited to start my subscription! Funko, who are the
company that actually makes the figures, are constantly pumping out new lines
like the Toy Story line and the Harry Potter line, which are duly added to the
Pop In A Box inventory for you to yay or nay. If you think that this
subscription service sounds as awesome as I think it is, then click here to sign up now!
And yes, I genuinely
did sell someone a One Direction Colouring Book
P.S. Because I completely forgot about how I started this post, the email I received was basically giving me a link for 5% off your first Pop In A Box, which is the link I embedded two sentences ago. This disjointed ending to the post is what I deserve for trying to write this whilst making fish fingers but hey ho, I'm a hungry boy so what can ya do
P.S. Because I completely forgot about how I started this post, the email I received was basically giving me a link for 5% off your first Pop In A Box, which is the link I embedded two sentences ago. This disjointed ending to the post is what I deserve for trying to write this whilst making fish fingers but hey ho, I'm a hungry boy so what can ya do
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