It’s funny how time gets away from you. Twenty-three years
ago, Scott Adams drew a Dilbert strip featuring a street vendor selling “Nose
Puppies” from a cart; when the title character inquires, the vendor tells him
that they are small ceramic puppies that fit inside one’s nose. It is later
revealed that the product was never terribly popular until the vendor hit upon
the idea of putting them up a customer’s nose, whereupon they became a very
fast-selling item. Adams is riffing on the old entrepreneur’s adage of “find a
need and fill it” – literally, in this case, since that’s both what one does
with a Nose Puppy and the punch line of the first strip – but as silly as this
example seems, a great many new companies and the occasional commercial dynasty
have been started exactly this way. It wasn’t until this week that I became
aware of a company that sells something even more bizarre and inexplicable as a
consumer product…
You can pick up the original story about them from the
Kernel website if you want to, or visit them on their home page, but unless
this is a Penguin Warehouse-style prank, it appears that there really is a
company called Ship a Dick, and that for a relatively small fee they will ship
a large cardboard representation of male genitalia to the recipient of your
choice. It isn’t clear from context in either story why you would want to do
such a thing, or to whom you would send it, but the company claims to be moving
anywhere from 5 to 15 of these things a day (more around the holidays) in
models ranging from $10 to $20 plus shipping and handling, which would
translate out to somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000 a year – not an
insignificant revenue stream for a side business with effectively no
advertising. If marketed properly there is no telling how many of these
products they might be able to sell…
Now, according to the linked news story, this isn’t really
what the company does. The two entrepreneurs behind it actually run a laser
engraving business, putting custom inscriptions onto all manner of things that
do not normally carry inscriptions, which is probably where they got the idea
for putting customer messages onto cardboard constructs that you (probably)
couldn’t show on television. Making and selling these oddball greeting cards
(that’s all this really is, if you think about it) is a sideline, and it will
probably stay that way – but there aren’t a lot of hobbies that can bring in
that kind of revenue, and I’m entirely serious when I suggest that if this idea
goes viral the company could produce enough sales to add one or two more zeroes
to those revenue figures. At least, until someone else copies their idea and
comical, oversized obscene greeting cards become a standard consumer product
category…
I call this story to your attention because despite the
comical tone and risqué product, this really is an example of an
entrepreneurial project that worked. Using skills, equipment, facilities and
personnel already available to them, the owners of the company developed a new
product, created a new company identity, and are successfully selling to
thousands of customers around the world. Continued success will probably require
that they develop follow-on products, and most likely that they invest in some
marketing activities, but there is reason to believe that despite its absurdity
this venture will continue to generate revenue for some time to come. Regardless
of how one feels about obscene greeting cards – or Nose Puppies in general – it’s
hard to argue that this is an excellent example of a project that created an
incremental increase in profits while requiring almost no commitment of
resources. Or, in other words, that this is in fact a brilliant entrepreneurial
venture…
Even if it is something that the owners of the company
probably won’t tell their families about…
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