BANISHING BOREDOM

Take yourself back just a few years. The world looked a bit different than it does now, but a pocket of America was in the grips of a unique, specific phenomenon: subscription boxes. This trend was spurred on by the massive success of Loot Crate, which began sending monthly boxes of gaming merchandise to geeky subscribers in 2012. Before long, it seemed like there was a box for everything: Dog lovers had BarkBox, makeup aficionados had Birchbox, and so on.

Chicago native Phil Jacobs saw this market exploding and, in a moment of clarity, applied it to his lifelong