Your competitors are pouring resources into ad copy, course platforms, and AI-generated content. Mark Stern is thinking about what shows up at your customer's door.

The founder of Custom Box Agency joins Andrea and Susan to make a compelling case that the most underrated tool in your online business right now isn't a new AI model, it's something you can hold in your hands.

Mark Stern is the founder of Custom Box Agency, a full-service physical product company based in Austin, Texas, that helps online business owners, course creators, and entrepreneurs design, produce, and ship intentional customer experiences.

Mark left corporate America after years at Deloitte to build a business around a deceptively simple insight: getting the right tools into your customer's hands changes everything.

He and his team strategize, design, produce, and warehouse physical products for clients across industries globally, and what he's built has become a quiet differentiator in a world drowning in digital noise.

There's a reason you remember the smell of the box more than you remember the webinar. Mark Stern has built an entire business on that fact.

When Andrea introduces Mark as someone who specializes in "immersive experiences with physical products," she's nodding to something she sees as a sister discipline to her own background in user experience on the software side. And the parallel is real.

Both disciplines are obsessed with the same question: how do you actually get a human being to do the thing that will change their life?

Mark's answer starts with the senses. A digital-only product, no matter how polished, taps into exactly two: what people see and what they hear. Every other sense, touch, smell, taste, even proprioception, is left completely dormant.

Think about why Disneyland feels different from anything else you've ever experienced. Think about why a live concert can't be replicated on a screen. Think about why the restaurant you love feels irreplaceable. The answer isn't the content. It's the full-body, multi-sensory environment.

A physical product, done intentionally, starts to close that gap.

​But Mark is quick to draw a line that he comes back to again and again: the goal is never swag. "Swag means stuff without a goal," he says, with clear conviction. Send someone a box of logo'd items without connection to their journey and it ends up in the hotel room trash or the Goodwill pile.

What actually moves people forward, he argues, is receiving the exact tools they need to remove the obstacles between them and the outcome they paid for.

"It fundamentally changes the nature of the conversation you're having with the person you're serving. They have what they need. Now it's about them doing it."

Andrea pushes this further with a story from her time at Iowa State, where machine learning pioneer Alex Stoychev famously required his graduate students to handwrite their lab notes rather than type them. His hypothesis: the physical act of writing activates different regions of the brain, creating more openness to creativity and experimentation.

Mark immediately connects this to his own obsession. There's something about pen to paper that digital will never fully replicate, and the smartest businesses are starting to engineer that into their customer journeys on purpose.

The conversation takes an unexpected turn when Susan names what many online business owners are quietly sensing but struggling to articulate: the course model is dying. Post-COVID, the information product space boomed and then bloated.

Now AI can generate a complete learning plan in seconds, for free. What people are paying for isn't information anymore, it's transformation. And transformation, Mark argues, requires an experience economy approach, something you can touch, sequence, and move through.

What makes this land is a moment near the middle of the episode when Mark pulls out his Spartan trifecta medal on camera. He holds up one wedge-shaped piece of a three-part medal and explains that Spartan Race's entire genius is that they give you a partial medal after your first race. Then two-thirds after your second.

The third piece, the one that completes the set, can only be earned. "If I had to drag my body across the finish line for a half marathon, there was no way I was going to end the year with an incomplete medal." That's not motivation. That's identity engineering. And it's something any business owner can replicate.

Andrea shares her own story from the Library of Congress, where a physical passport handed at the door sent her on a guided journey through the museum's installations, only to funnel into a digital experience at home that, despite being genuinely impressive, felt like a bit of an emotional letdown.

Mark diagnoses the issue instantly: the physical-to-digital handoff was unfinished. There was no celebration, no visual scrapbook, no anchor that kept the emotional memory of the physical experience alive as she crossed into the digital layer.

"The problem is it seems like an unfinished journey. They didn't round out the end."

The practical implications of this are real for anyone building programs or offers: don't just add a physical component and call it done. The physical and digital layers have to speak to each other at the moment of transition, or you lose the very warmth and momentum you created.

The episode ends in territory that feels genuinely new for the show. Mark shares that he's been using AI to analyze his own physical transformation, uploading progress photos and receiving detailed, personalized feedback on what's working and where his opportunity areas are. The AI, he says, gave him "words to things I didn't know I had words for."

It's the kind of experience that Andrea mirrors with her own experiments around mindset and mental health, and then immediately interrogates: how far do you let yourself feel seen by something that doesn't actually care about you?

It's a question neither of them fully resolves. But Susan's closing thought might be the most clarifying of the episode: we're not afraid of AI. The issue is making a conscious decision, right now, not to let it replace human connection when human connection is what's actually needed.

"We just have to make a decision that we will not allow it to replace human connection, that we will not allow it to be the go-to thing when we know that a human connection is the needed thing."

Mark is, as Andrea points out, perfectly positioned for the pendulum swing back toward the physical. And if this conversation is any indication, that swing has already started.

[00:00] Welcome and introduction of Mark Stern, founder of Custom Box Agency
[01:22] Mark explains the origin of Custom Box Agency and what the business does
[05:08] The senses framework: why digital-only products only tap into sight and sound
[07:00] Andrea's story about handwriting lab notes at Iowa State and the science behind pen to paper
[08:39] Mark on removing obstacles vs. sending swag, and the real job of a physical product
[12:15] Can AI ever replace physical products? Mark's honest answer on what AI enables vs. threatens
[14:40] The rise of digital distrust and why analog is coming back
[15:34] Susan on the death of the course model and the shift to transformation and experiences
[17:52] Mark's Mariah Carey analogy: why the "build it once, sell it forever" model is collapsing
[19:31] Low barriers to entry for physical products now, and why the timing is right
[20:10] Andrea's Library of Congress passport story and the physical-to-digital handoff problem
[22:00] Mark on the Holocaust museum technique and the power of personalized journey design
[26:09] Susan asks about scent in boxes, Mark's smell rabbit hole, and the science of olfactory memory
[29:54] Mark walks through the Custom Box Agency framework: backend anchor, onboarding, phases
[33:05] The Spartan trifecta medal and how gamification engineers identity transformation
[35:41] "Do not open until" mechanics, box series strategies, and collection psychology
[39:06] Andrea asks: does AI help us be more human, or less?
[40:00] Mark shares his personal story: using AI to track his physical transformation and find self-worth
[43:13] Andrea's AI mental health experiments and the question of how far to trust the feeling of being seen
[44:30] Mark on the Ready Player One fear, VR, and the beverage industry's early concerns
[46:21] Susan on making a conscious decision not to let AI replace human connection
[49:06] The post-COVID pendulum: why in-person events and physical connection are coming back
[50:18] Rapid fire: Mark's daily practice for staying human (it's the sauna)
​[51:28] Where to find Mark and how to connect with Custom Box Agency

If this conversation got your wheels turning about what a physical product could do for your own program or offer, we'd love to hear it.

Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with someone building in the experience economy. And if you haven't left a review yet, it means more than you know.

​Stay human. Stay connected.