Since July all our waking hours and dreams for that matter have been consumed by the hifold launch although there has been a little time left over for some other noteworthy developments….
Where to begin? I left you all hanging since my last blog and I’m sure you are dying to know who won our World Cup sweep stake. Well very surprisingly seeing as I had Germany and Spain, it wasn’t me! Congratulations to Davide and France! Enjoy your $50!
On July 31st, we enthusiastically launched hifold, our grab-and-go highback booster on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The campaign has been strong so far and well supported with over $469,000 raised by 3658 backers and we have reached 922% of our target! (We actually beat our initial $50K goal within 30 minutes of the campaign launching!) Unsurprisingly, the majority of our backers are based in the US but we also have had a large number of backers from the UK, Germany, Singapore and Hong Kong. Because the crowdfunding environment has changed significantly since the mifold campaign, we have had to become more and more creative about our PR and promotional initiatives. We communicate with our supporters regularly offering them various incentives to buy hifold.
A great deal of buzz was created with our cup clip perk which allows backers to buy a cup clip to attach to their new hifold at a nominal price. The first stage of the campaign has now been completed and we have moved into the “In Demand” phase so people can continue to purchase their hifold.
On the sales front, US sales are up with Nordstom launching mifold Sport in stores and Kohl’s launching mifold online in July. Walmart have also agreed to stock mifold in its brick and mortar stores from next year. Sales in Target have been particularly strong in those stores that have monitors showing how mifold works – sell through in these stores has been almost double that of Target stores without monitors and Target has therefore agreed to expand the monitor program to all its stores. A great success story! Pleasingly this quarter, sales are also up on Amazon as a result of huge investments in time by both the sales and marketing teams.
The Sales team had a very successful trip to the South East Asia’s leading Juvenile products show in Shanghai (CBME)where they discussed strategy with many of our Asian distributors.
In the last few months we have happily hosted distributors in our offices from Uruguay, Israel and China and were especially delighted to welcome our Distributor of the Year 2017, Patricia from Maqui Trading in Chile, whose prize for winning this accolade was an all-expenses paid trip to see us at Head Office. The prize obviously included a team dinner and tours of various local heritage sites.
This quarter we will be saying goodbye to the lovely Ken as he leaves us in search of pastures new. We have loved working with him and hearing his unbelievable stories - he has had such a positive impact on the company and wish him every success in his future endeavors. Matt will now take on the position of Global VP Sales supported by Jacqui and Gaynor.
In terms of marketing, as well as a host of hifold marketing initiatives, the marketing team has been working hard to help our distributors enhance their mifold marketing and consolidate the mifold story. The marketing team devises a monthly mifold marketing update, aptly named the MMMU, packed full of ideas for social media posts, new product images, infographics and news about what other distributors have been doing.