ABOUT US

Three People. Different Backgrounds. One Mailbox.

The Mailbox Drop was started by Grant, Mackenzie and Taylor — an uncle and two nieces who came to it from very different backgrounds, but with one idea in common: discovering interesting creative work should still feel human.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE MAILBOX DROP

Grant Gipe

Grant Gipe

Co-Founder · Business & Operations

Grant has spent much of his career building and running things behind the scenes — from helping launch a mobile operator in Bulgaria to a decade in the travel industry and leading large-scale customer operations with teams working across countries and continents.

At The Mailbox Drop, he looks after the business, technology and operations side of things, turning ideas into something that can actually work.

He's also a writer and the author of 8-Track Boy, a coming-of-age novel set in 1978.

Mackenzie Mahlinger

Mackenzie Mahlinger

Co-Founder · Art & Creative

Mackenzie is an artist and graduate of the Barcelona Academy of Art. She brings an artist's perspective to The Mailbox Drop — helping discover artists, shape the creative direction, and consider how someone's work can become part of a physical experience worth receiving.

She's also the illustrator of Taylor’s Tangles a children's book her mother wrote about her sister's tangled hair. Outside The Mailbox Drop, she shares more of her art, travels, and life through her personal YouTube channel.

Taylor Mahlinger

Taylor Mahlinger

Co-Founder · Marketing & Brand

Taylor leads marketing and brand for The Mailbox Drop — shaping how the company presents itself, how we introduce people to the artists we discover, and how the story of a new company gets told while we're still building it.

Her creative background started long before The Mailbox Drop. As a singer-songwriter, Taylor wrote, performed, and shared her own music online, giving her firsthand experience of what it means to make something personal and put it in front of an audience.

She brings that creator's perspective to how we think about the TMD brand, its audience, and the artists we work with.

We Think Discovery Should Come From People, Not Just Algorithms.

We find artists at exhibitions and art fairs, through recommendations, while travelling, online and sometimes completely by accident.

There isn't a formula for what makes us stop and look.

That's rather the point.

OUR STORY

Built Between Places

The Mailbox Drop started while the three of us were living and working in different places — Barcelona, the United States and, increasingly, wherever one of us happened to be at the time.

What began as an idea about putting interesting work from independent artists into people's mailboxes gradually became something bigger: a way to discover artists, work with them fairly, and make physical things people might actually want to keep.

Building a company across countries and time zones isn't particularly efficient.

We're doing it anyway.

WHAT WE'RE TRYING TO BUILD

Something Worth Discovering. Something Worth Keeping.

We want The Mailbox Drop to be a place where people discover artists they might otherwise never have found.

Sometimes that discovery will happen on a screen.

Sometimes something from that artist will arrive in your mailbox.

Either way, someone just has to make us stop and look.