hitting a high note with hifold

4 min read

hitting a high note with hifold - mifold

 

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. 

 In addition, we also send ideas for a weekly post to ensure that distributors have enough material to maintain mifold’s visibility and do so consistently. Response has been great and many are now regularly using the insights and information provided!  In August, Jonny and Rachel ran a marketing workshop in London for our UK distributor, Whitestep to discuss current challenges and to look at ways to move sales forward.  This has generated interest from other distributors to run similar workshops. 


 Rather impressively mifold was featured on the Facebook page VT receiving 2M views and over 10,000 engagements,  



 Davide has been rubbing shoulders with hundreds of bloggers and influencers at an event in New York and most excitingly Davide got engaged!  Congratulations! 

 

Robert in his capacity as COO has spent the last three months flying from coast to coast and everywhere in between in the US.  Why you might ask has he done a whistle stop tour of 8 states? Well the time has come in mifold’s life, and with the impending shipping of hifold, to upgrade our logistics and distribution network.  Robert has chosen from an impressive list of contenders a new Third Party Logistics Company to take our distribution to the next level.

 In other news Jon was the guest speaker at the Kidz in Motion Conference in Colorado, mifold won another award the TTPM in the US for best car seat product 2018, Gaynor’s daughter got married (again congratulations!) and 

Rayna wins the guardian angel award for rescuing a girl who flew off of her bike in front of our office 

 August saw some midsummer madness with a company night out to a private salon for dinner – we now have delusions of grandeur and the bar has definitely been raised for future team nights out

 

 

Overall Quarter 3 has been a very positive quarter with increased sales of mifold worldwide, extremely encouraging hifold sales and an ever smiling mifold team!  See you in December!