Finding My Mailbox Moment
(Originally published on September 24, 2013)
I’m a 35 year old struggling entrepreneur. I haven’t had my Mailbox moment yet. But that doesn’t mean I’m still not trying. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes, even if I was just a toddler.
When I was a little kid, my Dad was a struggling entrepreneur too. He was trying to make his greenhouse business work but the problem was, he didn’t have a green thumb. One of the main plants he grew were Poinsettias, and they always bloomed in January. That’s not a good thing. Nobody buys Poinsettias after Christmas.
He was in debt and the bank was going to foreclose on his home. One day my Mom was at a local arts and crafts show. This was back in the early 80’s so there was no Etsy to see what people were doing. She noticed that one lady’s table was busy. This lady was selling what looked like fragranced dirt in a ziplock bag. My Mom bought one of the bags and brought it back to my Dad and told him they were really selling. He looked at it and immediately knew what it was. It was vermiculite, which is like micah that’s been exploded like popcorn. It’s extremely absorbent and he used it in his potted plants. The lady at the trade show had mixed the vermiculite with fragrance oil and the vermiculite had absorbed it. He looked at my Mom and told her, “I could make that.” So, he bought some fragrance oil, pulled out my Mom’s harvest gold blender, and mixed up a batch in the kitchen. It worked.
My Dad’s no designer but he’s no dummy either. In a smart marketing move on his part, instead of packaging the concoction in a ziplock bag, he hired an artist to create a nice painting on a paper envelope. He found a printer that would print it and he put the scented vermiculite in the envelope. The “scented sachet” was born. He called it Fresh Scents.
Around the same time he was mixing vermiculite and fragrance oil in the kitchen, he was over at his sister’s house and happened to run across a book my uncle had lying around. The book was the 1980’s version of “Direct Marketing for Dummies.” Back then, direct mail was just beginning and there wasn’t nearly as much junk mail as today, particularly in the business-to-business market. He didn’t know it at the time but direct mail back then was sort of like the equivalent of the early days of Pay-Per-Click advertising. Direct mail wasn’t nearly as competitive as it is today. There was money to be made. He searched high and low for a list of Mom-and-Pop gift shops across the country. He bought the list and sent a couple thousand of them a miniature sample of the scented sachet along with an order form. It was a big investment for him, particularly given that he was going bankrupt and didn’t know if it would even work.
We lived way out in the country and had a big ol’ country mailbox. A few days after my Dad sent out the initial test mailing, my Mom went to check the mail. She was carrying me in her arms. As she walked up our long driveway to the mailbox, she grew angrier and angrier. The mailbox was so slam full of envelopes, it wouldn’t close. The only thing she could think was, “I can’t believe we sent all of those mailings out and now they’re all being rejected and returned to sender.” When she got to the mailbox, she opened up the first envelope. Inside was a check and a completed order form. She opened up another. Same thing. They all had checks and order forms. She was so used to business failure and rejection, she couldn’t believe something actually worked. She ran and told my Dad. He was as surprised as her.
He’d just had what I like to call, a “Mailbox Moment.”
Most successful entrepreneurs I talk to who’ve built profitable businesses have a defining moment. It’s the moment they discover 1) people want what they’re selling, 2) the sales process is replicable, and 3) the sales process is profitable. It’s a MailBox Moment.
After his initial success, my Dad sent out direct mail pieces again and again over the years until it stopped working and he found other ways to sell. That simple little envelope sachet became the bedrock of my father’s home fragrance business, which is still around today. Those sachets are still in gift stores around the world and in retail chains like Bed, Bath, and Beyond. He’s sold millions upon millions of those sachets and now manufactures all kinds of home fragrance products.
I hear stories of companies like Dropbox who never spent a dollar on marketing or advertising yet still spread virally. Those are the exceptions, the anomalies. Most of us have to find a way to sell our product any way we morally can. Almost every day, I ask myself what I’m doing to find my MailBox Moment — what I’m doing to find a replicable, scalable, and profitable process for picking up customers.
With some of my ventures I’ve discovered that no matter how many marketing dollars I spent or how many marketing methods I tried, it was never going to work. I was selling Poinsettias in January when I needed to be selling scented sachets. Other times, I’ve discovered I was selling scented dirt in a ziplock bag when I needed to be selling it in a pretty sachet.
I don’t claim to have the answers. In fact, the more I learn in business, the fewer answers I have. But, I can keep searching. I can keep scrounging. And maybe, just maybe, if I’m one of the fortunate few, I’ll walk down my driveway one day and have my own Mailbox Moment.
Originally published at blog.doddcaldwell.com.
