Clutchfans who are creative/innovative - Need your advice!

Royce has some free time on his hands. He says he's good at this and since he doesn't say anything about being good at bball which is true, then maybe he really can help.

Seriously good luck on your adventure.

 

Nigerian?

 

How much does it cost to give a lifetime water supply to 1 person?

 

The first thing that occurs to me is that you need more products than just the wedding rings -- if you aren't already doing that. You have a natural platform at the weddings/receptions of couples who buy in for marketing and additional products. You can sell similar products for the gifts for groomsmen and bridesmaids (maybe even a package deal). You can make donations for clean water an item on the couple's registry. And -- though this is very delicate and dicey -- you can look for ways to get your message in on pre-wedding communications or at the venues (I'm not sure how yet). You're preying a bit on cultural gift-giving obligations, but I don't think you should let that bother you. And everyone who ends up buying a gift or receiving a gift from your company is a potential repeat customer later on if they like you, so you get a network effect. Expanding your presence in a wedding event can also drive conversation -- even negative ("Can you believe the only thing left to buy on the registry was that stupid Haitian water well?!") and improve mindshare.

And, of course, maybe there are other life-event milestones you can try to serve. Funerals, births, first communions, bar mitzvahs? Just spitballing here.

Building relationships with wedding planners might give you some traction, but I doubt they are often consulted about ring purchases, so I don't know how effective that would be. Still, it wouldn't hurt to let them know you exist. And, if you could make a more holistic wedding event product, the wedding planner might be more influential.

Otherwise, as someone with his own small business to market, there's marketing you can do cheaply, but it takes work. Word-of-mouth is free if you can people something compelling to talk about. The website (which looks great btw) will do plenty of work. Social media is hard to get right (we can't manage it), but has a lot of potential. PR can be free if you can get a writer interested. Also, starting a thread on a bbs with a wide readership would be helpful.

 

I think I've seen this movie with Ron Jeremy...

 

I should take that off my sig, I guess. Microsoft closed the service I was using to host it, and I keep thinking I'll rebuild it elsewhere, but I never do. It was a website to show my father's artwork. He says he's doing another show in the fall, so maybe that'll get my butt in gear to get a site up.

 

Come up with a better idea. That's my advice. Seems that you're targetting a niche within a niche.

 

Great idea. If I did social media, I would post about it. Word of mouth advertising is king with adults.

 

damn, I have an enterprise that I think would be perfect for your needs in terms of spreading the word and looking for creativity, but it's more suited to the Eastern Canadian market (as that's where we're based).

Hit me up through the board for my email if you're interested in getting some crowd-sourced solutions, at good value (if not necessarily good brand exposure, unless you guys do online selling).

As for free advice I can impart, take a look at Ten Tree (which does something similar) and how they've grown the concept and made it viral.

https://www.facebook.com/tentreeapparel?fref=ts
http://www.tentree.org/

 

It's not clear to me exactly how your model works. Are you selling rings at normal prices, and using profits to finance water wells? Are you marking up the ring prices?

I just think it's a tough sell, even for those really charitable/hippy/whatever couples. I'd rather not be limited on ring choices... I can always donate $50 bucks or $100 bucks or however much I want to a good cause.

An easier sell for me would be the add-on $1 approach. Which would work well when tied into gift registries. For every gift purchased through a registry, have the guests add-on an extra $1 for [insert cause]. Then the couple can match up to a certain amount it they want.

 

I think that's an odd attitude to take. I think tying the ring to something like water wells adds a new dimension of differentiation. As far as ring manufacturers or retailers go, you can try to differentiate with better designs, but for a customer looking at a thousand rings to pick out something they like, there isn't much to give one player a leg up on another. Differentiating along a different axis like charity sets this line of rings off from others in a unique way. It's a long-tail* niche market, but the internet make long-tail markets work.

Of course, you can just donate money, but it won't be integrated with the ring and therefor your marriage. The 100 bucks or whatever you spend on it will be more meaningful to you for the association it has than it would standing alone. Likewise, a registry adder won't have that effect either because it's not tied to a personal artifact; it's more like having a teller ask if you want to contribute to the march of dimes when you check-out. Useful, but not personally transformative. Not everyone will care, but some will.

* Long-tail is a phrase I picked up somewhere to describe companies that have a very low density of customers -- a niche market -- that can nevertheless be efficiently marketed to and serviced because of the internet. Imagine a graph with the size of the market on the x-axis (from high to low), and number of competitors on the y-axis. You have a big hump on the left, and it declines into a long tail at the right.

 

Go apply to be on shark tank. They will tell you that you don't make enough money, but at least people will have heard of you. Profit (or buy water or whatever).