Think inside the box.
#12 • Stories & Lessons of Founding Baron Fig
“We have a problem,” Adam said. He was holding a torn shipping package.
“Oh boy.” I already knew what he was going to say. “How bad?”
“I’ll let you decide,” he said, reaching into the beaten shipping envelope. He pulled out a Confidant notebook and handed it to me.
“Yikes.” It was bad.
“It looks like the postal workers played soccer with it during their break.”
This conversation happened right in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign. We had just hit 6x our goal (ultimately we raised $168k at 11x), and we still couldn’t figure out this problem.
We were launcing Baron Fig exclusively as a direct to consumer company, which means 100% of our sales were being delivered via mail. We were on our fifth test shipment — and our fifth utterly dented and bruised book. The padded envelope just wasn’t cutting it.
In just a few weeks we’d be sending out over 8,600 notebooks. Our company would be dead in the water before we even started if they all arrived looking like they’d been rolled over by a truck.
“We need to replace the shipping envelope with a sturdy box,” I said. It was a logical solution for the issue at hand. One that would’ve worked, sure, but Adam had an even better suggestion.
“Instead of spending extra to send this in a box, let’s put the book itself in a box, then put that in the padded envelope. This way the presentation itself is improved and costs are still even.”
“Who puts a notebook in a box?” My first reaction wasn’t positive. We discussed it further, Adam laid down his case, and eventually I was sold.
I mocked up a few dozen boxes, we found one we liked, and we were off. Now each box has a little easter egg that says, “This box protects your book as it travels to you.” On top of that, our brand is more prominent, unique, and well presented.
I don’t doubt that the issue would’ve been solved if we’d gone with my solution. In going with Adam’s solution, however, we didn’t just fix the issue — we turned it into an asset.
Joey Cofone is Co-Founder & CEO at Baron Fig. The Founding of Baron Fig shares the stories and lessons learned on the journey of creating our startup.
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