How I launched a Snow Shipping company…
Boston was hit with record breaking blizzards in February 2015.
My wife Jess and I were shoveling our driveway laughing (read: crying) at 4-FEET of snow piling up in our front yard. We thought to ourselves: Would anyone buy snow?
A couple of days later we launched Ship Snow, Yo with the tagline: Shipping Historic Boston Snow.
Little did we know: Ship Snow, Yo would go on to become a seasonal, 5-figure, weird business.
The first day live, SSY was covered in BostInno. The next morning the Boston Globe… and two weeks later everything snowballed.
Featured on the TODAY Show, TIME, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and thousands of others!
With all the publicity, our sales climbed from 10 to 50, 50 to 100, 200…uh oh…
At the beginning we were not prepared to scale.
We had 24 water bottles and 8 feet of snow in our front yard.
It was just my wife and I hand packing each shipment, one by one. After a couple weeks, I brought in my brother to help. We organized the process into 3 groups, and improved our shipping velocity.
While my brother and wife worked on shipping, I went off to develop the website, interview with the press and evolve the product.
There were streaks where I would wake up and work from 5am to 8am, work a full day at GSN Games, and back to SSY from 7pm to 1am at night.
It was exhausting and exhilarating…
As a result, the product evolved rapidly from a Water bottle full of snow (MVP) to aGuaranteed Snow “on arrival” Box in just 12 days!
Most of the experiments were variations in height x width of the boxes — and shipping enough snow to make sure it arrived as snow.
We also tried dry ice (too cold), different box material (too expensive), thickness, and of course — shipping carriers.
The most important thing we did early on was forge a partnership with FedEx. Now we exclusively ship using their Express overnight services.
In the 2 winter seasons we’ve been in business we’ve shipped 1,500+ lbs of snow from 3 frosty locations — Boston MA, Warren VT and Denver CO.
Last year for Christmas, we delivered a “White Christmas” to over 80 homes in Florida, Arizona, Texas, California and even New York City (crazy people right?!).
We’re proud to look back and recount how fun launching a weird business is. We’ve learned so much about the Shipping industry than we ever thought existed… and are always working to mix up our products. Who knows what we’ll come up with next year ;)
If you’d like to read more about the founding story, please check out our website about Ship Snow, Yo! Or follow Ship Snow, Yo on Facebook or Twitter.
