Nose Puppies

[Disclaimer: Parts of this post are NSFW and may be disturbing to readers of a sensitive disposition. Viewer discretion is advised.]

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…

Still Not Sure

A while back I wrote in this space about a $100,000 safety razor, and how I was having trouble determining if the whole thing was a hoax or not. We’ve seen cell phones inlaid with gold and precious stones that cost even more, mattress sets that cost nearly as much, and cashmere bathroom tissue that would certainly add up after a few years, but $100,000 for something you can obtain for less than a dollar per use seems excessive. If you use a disposable razor once and then throw it out, you’d still have to live for more than 273 years before the iridium razor would pay for itself. Even if you use one of the more absurdly overpriced cartridges (I’m looking at you, Gillette Fusion) once and then throw it out, you’d still need to shave for another 70 years or so before you’d break even. But as outrageous as that might seem, I still think that the $200,000 bottle of scotch is harder to believe…

According to a note on the Only Excess website, the master blenders over at Chivas Brothers are putting together a blend of the best and most expensive Scotch whiskey “…as a liquid tribute to the oldest crown jewels in the British Isles.” Part of it, of course, is the bottle itself, which is described as being “…made from black porcelain, adorned with 413 flawless black and white diamonds, as well as 22 carats of other gemstones, set in gold and silver.” Rarity is probably also a factor, since the run of this stuff will be limited to just 21 bottles; if you’re the sort of person who would want to drink $200,000 booze in the first place (that’s somewhere around $10,000 a shot, depending on how big the bottle actually is), you’d probably like the fact that no one else is going to be able to enjoy such a thing. But what really caught my attention was the fact that the liquid inside is said to be a blend of the best whiskeys made in Scotland. Years of hanging around with scotch drinkers has already taught me that the best scotches are all single-malt types – and that most real connoisseurs will not use blended scotch for insecticide…

Obviously, if such a product actually exists, the point of having it won’t be the quality of the liquor; it will be the status conferred by having one of the rarest beverages ever marketed, in one of the most opulent packages ever developed. You can see some billionaire or celebrity buying a bottle and then displaying it in a locked cabinet in their study – or opening the thing at a party and inviting all of the guests to sample a glass. What makes this story so fantastical is that unlike the iridium razor – which is guaranteed to function perfectly for ten years or be replaced by the manufacturer – this stuff could be accidentally guzzled by a drunken houseguest on a weekend bender (who might then give the bottle to a passing driver with a demand to get him a refill)…

For the same monetary outlay, you could obtain 250 bottles of an ordinary super-premium scotch whiskey (Johnny Walker Blue runs about that), or at least 21 cases (possibly more if you order all of it at once; most distributors will offer a volume discount on an order that large) – enough to get the average person seriously drunk for something on the order of four or five years. If you were willing to accept merely exceptional scotch, you’d have enough to get falling-down drunk every day for anywhere from fifty to one hundred years, or until you died of liver failure (whichever came first)…

Until I actually hear from someone who actually paid $200,000 for a single bottle of alcohol, I’m going to remain skeptical. Would anyone really charge that kind of money for such a small amount of product? More to the point, would anyone pay that much? Is this story for real, or is someone trolling me? Only time will tell…

I Can’t Tell

There’s an Internet meme which is coming up more and more often these days: it’s a cartoon character (the version I’ve seen most often features Fry from Futurerama) with half-closed eyes, signifying skepticism, and the legend which reads “I can’t tell: are you trolling or just really stupid?” It’s a measure of how common our fun-loving friends the Internet trolls are becoming that just about everybody has encountered an example of their work that is hard to distinguish from some real aspect of our weird world – or, perhaps, it’s a mark of just how weird our world is becoming. Still, it’s getting harder to imagine any political or philosophical standpoint that is so exotic that there absolutely couldn’t be someone somewhere who actually holds that position to be true, or any product or service that could be offered that would be too stupid for anyone to actually wish to purchase. That said, I’m still not sure if the people behind the $100,000 razor are serious…

You can visit the website here if you want to, but the basic idea is simple enough: The Zafirro Iridium (that’s what they’re calling it) has blades made out of real sapphires, a handle made out of pure iridium, and the screws holding it together are made from jewelry-grade platinum. It’s guaranteed for 10 years, complete with sharpening and repair services, and if the materials are really as described it should be almost impossible to damage the thing anyway; iridium is the second-densest known element (about .1% lower than osmium), doesn’t corrode at temperatures below 2,000 degrees centigrade, and won’t actually melt below 2,466 degrees centigrade (4,471 degrees Fahrenheit). Synthetic sapphire is used to make armor for military vehicles (and in some forms of body armor), and sapphire “glass” (actually transparent crystals made with synthetic sapphire) is used to make shatter-resistant windows for armored vehicles. And, of course, if anything does break, the company’s warranty would include repairs anyway…

A much more immediate question is why anyone would buy such a thing in the first place. Even if we are willing to assume an individual with sufficiently high disposable income to make $100,000 USD a negligible amount, it’s still hard to imagine why such an individual would be willing to pay this much for a personal grooming device. There are any number of outrageously expensive luxury goods that would make marginally more sense than this would – and since there’s no practical way to test-drive such a thing, you’d be spending that sum on something that might be completely worthless, or (even worse) might not work any better than a 99-cent disposable razor…

Of course, the over-arching question here is whether this whole thing is a hoax or not. Fake Internet retailers have been around for years; I’ve referenced the Penguin Warehouse example before, and we’ve also talked about a mythical company selling pirate-hunting tours around the Horn of Africa, among other examples. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to say how far someone might be willing to take wretched excess these days. If cashmere toilet paper, bottled water that sells for $40 a liter, and mattresses that cost more than my car (actually, more than all of the cars I have ever owned put together) can all really exist, I can’t imagine why somebody might not try to sell a safety razor for $100,000 – especially if the product costs them only a few thousand dollars to make (iridium was cheaper than gold the last time I looked – only $500 to $800 an ounce)…

In the long run, I suppose, it really doesn’t matter; if the demand for such a product actually exists, someone will start making them even if the current advertisement is just a hoax. Because unlike importing penguins or transporting tourists into war zones, selling ridiculously over-priced consumer products is legal. It’s just a matter of whether the people behind this are testing the waters to see if such a product will sell or are just trying to make fun of people who attempt to purchase a $100,000 consumer product. From where I’m sitting, I can’t tell which one it is…

Too Bad

There’s been a news item swirling around the Internet for the past week about a new venture that combines extreme sports with big game hunting for the chance to do something more disturbing than most people will ever imagine: pirate-hunting cruises off the horn of Africa. The story goes that a group of Russian entrepreneurs got their hands on an unwanted cruise ship, outfitted it with lots of extra lights to make it easier to locate at night, and hired a bunch of ex-special forces troops to be the security detachment. They will then take passengers on a cruise up and down the Somali coast at about 5 knots, trolling for pirates. To make this more interesting, passengers will have the option of renting a variety of firearms by the day, with ammo provided at cut-rate prices. They promise that the ship will be attacked by pirates, or your money back. Alas, if only it were true…

Even a quick glance over the web site put up by this alleged business should tell the reader that there’s something fishy going on. There’s no contact information, no way to communicate with the “company” whose site you’ve located, and no way to order anything from them. In fact, there’s no information about the company, the people behind it, or even the boat you’re going to be riding on. There are also a few other minor points – the assault rifle ammunition is priced at less than 20% of what actual ammo for those weapons would cost, and the .50 caliber ammo is priced at less than 10% of what that costs; the legality of such a venture is highly questionable; how on Earth would they get financing for this, let alone insurance? – but none of these are quite as immediate as the question of who in their right mind would take these chances with either pirates attacking an un-armored, unprotected target like a cruise ship, or a bunch of un-trained civilians with automatic weapons and grenade launchers running around on their boat?

Some of you may remember a similar Internet business hoax from a few years ago, called Penguin Warehouse, which also purported to be an actual online business selling live penguins direct from Antarctica (and other points south where they have penguins) but was actually just an exercise in website design. Here again, the hoax became obvious when you realized that there was no way to contact the company or give them money, which would rather defeat the purpose of having an e-commerce site, if you think about it. The fact that the United States and most other countries have strict laws about importing exotic animals and owning one, none of which were even referenced by this site, would just have been confirmation. Which didn’t keep thousands of people from being disappointed when they realized this site was a hoax…

Personally, I’ve always been amazed that someone doesn’t try using sites like these as part of an Internet scam, like the famous (I hope!) Nigerian bank scams. All you’d need would be an off-shore account and a PayPal set-up, and you could easily take “deposits” for pirate-hunting cruises, live penguins, or any number of other things that people would be so delighted by that it wouldn’t occur to them to doubt the legitimacy of the company until it was too late. Of course, there are a lot of Internet scams that function exactly that way already, and it’s probably only because the Nigerians don’t really understand the American mentality that we haven’t seen more of this sort of cyber-crime. Which means that as soon as this story percolates to some of the seamier parts of the Internet, we probably WILL start getting spam about pirate-hunting cruise offers…

Maybe I’ll invest in some of that new anti-spam software – or even the companies that make it. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the demand is about to pick up…