Alas, breadpig, while a full-time hero to the world, has its day-to-day operations handled only on a part-time basis - if that. But the SF/SPCA and EFF alike have benefited from what was a pretty successful year. Drawing from a year with $30,000 in profits, breadpig donated $15,000 to the SF/SPCA with profits derived from the sale of some magnetic LOL speak poetry called LOLmagnetz. With the hope that others will consider replicating the breadpig model, we thought we'd share what we learned.
The economy may have been tanking, but despite that (or maybe because of it) people were looking to spend $19.99 on magnetic poetry in pidgin English. If you don't know about LOLcats, take a moment to educate yourself, and perhaps you'll see why people would want to adorn photos of pets or relatives with such captions. Yes, what had originated on 4chan was now going to cover dorm refrigerators nationwide.
Like most good ideas, this one came up over a few beers. I was getting a round with breadpig partner, S.I. Newhouse. Discussing new product ideas to complement our existing unholidaycards, he suggested the idea -- if they could make magnetic poetry for The "F" Word, surely someone would want it for LOLspeak.
It was many months before we finally got the chance to track down a supplier (not knowing anything about the magnet business, I ordered a kit of traditional magnetic poetry and found their supplier with a Google search). From there, we aimed to be ready in time for the first ROFLCon. I'd been invited as a panelist and moderator -- coincidentally, to moderate the LOLpanel. It seemed like the ideal place to announce and perhaps peddle our wares.
The conference arrived, and like most projects, we had hit some delays and only had a few kits ready. At that point, it just made the most sense to create tiny gift sampler bags with 10-15 magnets in each. We lugged a few hundred that we hand-packed up to Boston and distributed them widely throughout the con with an additional magnet instructing people that they'd be for sale soon. In fact, Scott Beale of LaughingSquid was the first to ever report on them.
It just so happened that Ben Huh, founder of icanhascheezburger was also at the conference - on that aforementioned LOLpanel in fact. A month or so after our debut at ROFLCon, he had produced his own version. These kits are smaller and cheaper, but it turns out we even shared the same supplier, who confirmed that these had been ordered shortly after our own.
Well, that's business for you. We knew we had to make up for lost time and S.I.'s brother Ben (another breadpig partner) finalized our 384-word corpus while S.I. wrote up the instructions and I created some suitable box art (story of our first model-cat here - with pics!).
We'd long ago registered the LOLmagnetz.com domain and Chris Slowe (the 4th partner) hacked our open-source reddit code into a site where anyone could submit, vote, and comment on photos of LOLmagnetz creations.
It wasn't long until the first kits were ready to ship -- we just had no idea where to. Distribution of shirts has no problem starting from one's apartment, but the weight and scale of all those LOLmagnetz kits posed a problem. Furthermore, we didn't have the market strength of icanhascheezburger, a community of rabid LOLcat fans. And that's when S.I. had his next great LOL-idea: ThinkGeek.
It started with a few emails and maybe even a voicemail, but I got in contact with a buyer there who loved the idea. ThinkGeek made their first order near the end of the fall, just as global economies were collapsing and the world needed LOL more than ever. They would make a number of subsequent orders, much to breadpig's delight.
ThinkGeek's support was invaluable, going so far as to feature LOLmagnetz twice in their much-anticipated catalogs and sales have continued well past the holiday season. I wish there were more time to focus on growing it, but things like a LOLmagnetz.com redesign will have to wait. In the meantime, maybe we can encourage someone to try something equally as zany.
As appealing as digital is for most of us, there's still very much a place for tangible stuff. And it doesn't matter if you haven't got any experience making it or selling it (though it doesn't hurt). A good idea, some work, and a bit of Googling is enough to bring something to fruition.
Let us know if you'd like elaboration on any of the above or share a related story of your own in the comments.
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