You will notice a rather over-sized change in your subscription box starting in February, 2024.

As part of this year’s Seasonal Series, we will be sending subscribers a beautiful extra large matchbox with long matches with their first shipment, and every 12th subscription order going forward—rather than a small matchbox with every shipment as we have been doing.

Over the last few years, we have seen a couple trends in feedback on our matches:

• “Bring back the long matches!” is a cry that has gained a fair bit of traction
• On the other hand, we have some folks who don’t use the matches and therefore find the practice wasteful

A look inside the matchbox

Behind the scenes the supply chain reality of matchboxes is actually quite fascinating. I won’t go into it in full detail here (though we do have this fun, ancient blog post on matchbox history that you might enjoy), but here is a tl;dr.

We estimate there are only about a dozen matchbox manufacturers left in the entire world. There is only left in North America, and they now only a produce a handful of formats—including the small matchbox format we have been sending you these past few months. Currently, they don’t make any long matches domestically.

We have played around with different matchbox formats over the years, almost all of them coming from the U.S. or Germany. With so little competition, and with industrial know-how shrinking around matchboxes, we observe variable quality, as well as increasing prices from the few suppliers left.

When we switched from our larger matchboxes made in Germany to the small matchboxes made domestically, it was both for quality reasons, and because prices skyrocketed—to a point where we would either have to increase our prices by a few dollars or make some other painful adjustment. After talking to other subscribers, we chose the route we took. I think most people suspect that our custom matchboxes cost a few cents. In reality our custom long matchboxes cost us $2-4 each (which typically would mean we factor ~$4-8 for them in our pricing).

Marrying it all with our philosophy

We find striking a match to be an integral part of connecting with our candles. There’s a tiny thrill in seeing that initial bright white flame that makes our pupils shrink and forces us to reset and focus. How to provide the same depth of experience while taking your feedback into account became the topic of many hours of discussions and many candle-lighting formats tested.

It also breaks our heart to hear stories of the matchboxes being a waste for certain Keapers.

After some research, we found that our German supplier could make an extra large format that perfectly fits into our candle shipments. We also observed the quality of these matches to be superior to all other formats—and they are long!

By sending you this larger format on a periodic basis, we are able to offer high quality matches that are longer and sturdier, as well as stay aligned with our commitment to reducing waste. The cost per box, as you might guess, is an order of magnitude higher, but we offset this by sending it with less frequency. No less importantly, it allows us to celebrate you on your Keapiversary with a little surprise! 🎂

Our hope is that you gain even more satisfaction from your matches—and that they make a compelling gift if you are not inclined to use matches (you can also contact us to opt out).

Let us know what you think!

We will be sending the new matchbox format with all February subscription shipments.

We hope that this feels like an upgrade for you, but for those who prefer older iterations of our matches, we still have some in stock, and you can always add them to your subscription.

If you have any questions or feedback about this change, please email us at thelab@keapbk.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Strike a pose,

Sofia + the Keap team