How Post & Porch Decides What Curb Appeal Products To Make Next

If you had looked at Post & Porch in 2017, you wouldn't have seen a collection of custom modern mailboxes, Corten steel planters, wreaths, doormats, and outdoor barn lighting. You would've found Danny Pilkington trying to solve one surprisingly specific problem: finding house numbers he actually liked enough to put on his own home.

That small frustration gave us a pretty useful way to think about Post & Porch products.

We pay attention to the parts of a home's exterior that people see constantly, use regularly, and often struggle to shop for – then we start asking what we'd want there instead. That's how Post & Porch grew from magnetic house numbers sold at Utah farmers' markets and home-and-garden shows into a much larger collection built around a home's curb appeal.

We haven't followed a grand master list of every outdoor product we eventually want to sell. Most of the interesting ideas have come from looking at the spaces we're already designing for and realizing there's another nearby piece worth considering.

When Danny started Post & Porch in 2017, the problem with house numbers wasn't that house numbers didn't exist on the market – there were plenty of them. 

The problem was finding something modern, substantial, visible, and appropriate for a house where someone had already spent time choosing the siding, front door, landscaping, hardware, and everything surrounding it. That eventually led to Post & Porch's magnetic address numbers, which could be installed and repositioned without drilling holes into the surface beneath them.

That original experience still influences the way we look at new products today.

When we're considering something for Post & Porch, we usually think of a familiar exterior feature with more potential than the typical big-box options give it. Sometimes that's a functional piece. Sometimes it's decorative. Often, it's somewhere in between. We want to know whether it belongs around the kinds of homes we're already designing for, whether it can contribute something visually, and whether we'd genuinely be excited to see it every time we pulled into the driveway.

That last part matters more than you might think.

See what customer questions have shaped Post & Porch into what it is today here →

The Malone Post-Mount Mailbox changed the scale of Post & Porch.

Danny hadn't originally set out to start a modern mailbox company, but once he began paying closer attention to curb appeal, the mailbox became difficult to ignore. Homeowners could spend thousands of dollars improving an exterior and still end up with a standard mailbox at the edge of the property because the alternatives weren't particularly interesting.

So, we made one.

The Malone became Post & Porch's post-mounted mailbox built around cleaner lines, durability, customization, and the idea that something practical could still contribute meaningfully to curb appeal. Post & Porch has since expanded into wall-mounted mailboxes, locking mailboxes, package delivery boxes, address sign products, and other exterior pieces, but that first modern mailbox helped define the territory we wanted to explore.

Once you start thinking about the mailbox as part of the home's exterior design, you naturally begin noticing everything around it. You notice the empty space beside the front door. You notice the porch light that's technically doing its job but has little personality. You notice the welcome mat that was bought because it happened to be available. You notice planters, door decor, hardware, house numbers, and all the other pieces that collectively shape the first few seconds of seeing a home.

That's where many of our newer ideas have come from.

Not every new Post & Porch product starts with an entirely new part of the house – sometimes we look at something we're already familiar with and realize there's a different problem hiding inside it.

Our Dual Access Post-Mounted Mailbox is a good example. A traditional curbside mailbox is designed around the mail carrier approaching it from the street, which makes perfect sense for delivery. Retrieving the mail can be a different story if your mailbox sits along a busy road, a tight curb, or somewhere you'd rather not step toward traffic every afternoon.

The Dual Access Post-Mount Mailbox gave us a way to rethink that routine without changing how the carrier uses the mailbox. Mail still goes in through the street-facing front door, while the homeowner can retrieve it through a second door from the yard side. It's a relatively small change to a product people have used the same way for generations, but that's exactly the kind of thing we tend to notice.

We don't assume a familiar exterior product is finished evolving simply because everybody already knows what it's supposed to do. If changing the size, access, material, finish, or another everyday detail can make it work better around someone's home, there's probably an idea worth exploring.

That mindset has helped us keep developing modern mailboxes while also looking beyond the mailbox itself.

Wreaths and doormats might seem like a jump from modern mailboxes until you look at where all three live – they're among the first things someone sees when approaching a house.

We'd already spent years thinking about how a mailbox looks from the street, how address numbers sit against different finishes, and how exterior details work with the surrounding architecture. Moving closer to the front door gave us another part of that same picture to work with.

Our wreath collection brings botanical texture, greenery, color, and seasonal interest to eye level, while our doormats give homeowners another way to add pattern and texture to an entryway. Together, they also make it easier to change a porch's personality and curb appeal without making any permanent changes to the house.

We like that flexibility.

A mailbox may stay in place for years, while a wreath can change with the season. A doormat can bring in a pattern you wouldn't necessarily choose for a larger architectural feature. Plants can change throughout the year. Those layers give modern homeowners more ways to make the exterior feel like theirs, and they make the front of the home a lot more fun for us to think about, too.

Our Corten steel planters came from another question we tend to ask: Does the material itself add something interesting? Corten steel certainly does.

Weathering steel develops a rust-toned patina as it's exposed to outdoor conditions, so the surface keeps changing after the planter arrives at its home. Climate, moisture, humidity, and wet-and-dry cycles can all influence how quickly and evenly that patina develops, so a Corten steel planter living through Utah's relatively dry climate can weather differently from one exposed to humid Southern Arkansas summers or frequent Pacific Northwest rain.

That variation was part of what drew us to it.

We've worked with steel for years through our modern mailboxes and other exterior products, so introducing another steel product made sense, while Corten steel gave us an entirely different finish and personality to explore. Instead of choosing one fixed painted color, the homeowner gets a planter whose appearance becomes increasingly connected to the place where it lives.

We also wanted different proportions rather than one Corten steel planter repeated in a handful of sizes. The Elms, Milard, Holbrook, and Millcreek give homeowners options for larger arrangements, compact footprints, added height, and lower horizontal plantings, which opens up very different uses around porches, patios, walkways, gardens, and entryways.

For us, that's a good sign that a category has somewhere to go. If we can imagine the product being useful in several kinds of homes, interacting well with landscaping and architecture, and becoming more interesting once a homeowner makes it their own, we start paying a whole lot of attention.

Lighting was another natural place for our eyes to wander. Outdoor wall lighting sits right alongside the kinds of details Post & Porch already thinks about: front doors, garage doors, house numbers, modern mailboxes, planters, walkways, and exterior finishes.

It's practical because homeowners need visibility around entrances and high-use outdoor spaces, but an exterior light fixture also has a noticeable architectural presence during the daytime. The shade shape, arm, placement, and finish all become part of the house’s curb appeal long before anyone flips the switch.

Our outdoor barn lighting collection includes both straight-arm and gooseneck designs, giving homeowners a choice between two profiles while keeping the fixtures useful for porches, garages, entryways, sheds, and other exterior areas. We liked what lighting added to the Post & Porch collection because it extends curb appeal into the hours when most of the other details start disappearing.

A mailbox catches your attention as you pull into the driveway. House numbers help identify the home. Planters and wreaths bring life and texture around the entrance. Once the sun goes down, outdoor lighting changes which of those details remain visible and how the whole exterior feels from the street. For a curb appeal company that spends a lot of time thinking about first impressions, that was worth exploring.

Our curb appeal collection is wider today, but we don't want Post & Porch to become a place where completely unrelated outdoor products accumulate simply because we could sell them. Each category should have a reason to be here.

A Corten steel planter should look at home near one of our modern mailboxes. A wreath should make sense above one of our doormats. Outdoor barn lighting should work with the same entryway where a homeowner has already chosen their address numbers, planter, or wall-mounted mailbox. They don't have to match perfectly, either – homes are more interesting than that.

What matters is that the products can share the same space without feeling like they came from entirely different conversations. That gives us a useful filter whenever another idea comes along. We can picture where it would live, what it would sit beside, how someone would use it, and whether it gives homeowners a worthwhile choice in an area where the options have felt a little forgettable.

If we struggle to answer those questions, it's probably not ready for Post & Porch.

Post & Porch has grown considerably from those early Utah farmers' market days, but we're still a small business, and that affects how we think about expanding. A new category matters to us because our name is going to sit beside it.

We're interested in building a collection homeowners can recognize rather than chasing every possible product that falls under the very broad umbrella of "outdoor." That means paying attention to materials, proportions, finishes, usefulness, how something looks beside the pieces we already offer, and whether it adds a genuinely new way to work on curb appeal.

It also means we can be a little particular.

We can get unusually interested in the way weather changes a sheet of Corten steel. We can debate whether a planter needs more height or more width. We can care about what a barn light looks like at noon even though its main job doesn't begin until evening. We can look at a bare front door and wonder whether there's a wreath we'd actually want hanging there ourselves.

Those details are usually where the next idea starts.

We have more places to look. There are still plenty of overlooked details between the street and the front door, and homeowners keep giving us new reasons to think about how those spaces could work better and look better at the same time.

Our collection will keep evolving, just as it did when house numbers led to modern mailboxes and mailboxes opened the door to a much broader view of curb appeal. Today, that view includes Corten steel planters, wreaths, doormats, outdoor barn lighting, package delivery boxes, address pieces, and plenty of other details that make a home's exterior feel considered.

We don't know that every future Post & Porch product will look anything like The Malone.

It should, though, make sense to live somewhere nearby.

That's usually how we know we're onto something.

Check out Post & Porch’s broad selection of curb appeal products here →