Hey,
Hope you had an exciting week.
At Perfora, each week throws amazing problems that we tackle or at least try to solve. We fail sometimes but that is fun too :)
Our pre-order plan is one such challenge that I want to tell you all about. It started with Jatan suggesting sometime in early July about running pre-orders and me laughing at his face to get his head in order. “Pre-orders won’t work here” is what I said.
A couple of weeks and some stupid conversations later, better sense prevailed and we got down to executing the pre-order plan. The launch video work started, the website was in the process of being finalised and all other jing bang when a mentor put forward a question - “How will you roll out the red carpet for your early supporters?”
This struck and got us thinking about how we can do something special for those who pre-order from us. After all, these will be people trusting a completely new brand. Discounts and better deals are fine however we needed a strong proposition to really make the experience worth it.
“How about we let people personalize their electric toothbrush with their name or anything they wanted on their new electric toothbrush ?” This came out convincingly as an offering that would make the experience special. Surely this could be done but with just a day to go live it was hard to pull this off.
Our operations hustler, Raghav was determined to make this work. The guy took off on a Saturday morning (24 hours before we went live) looking for printers, some 30 km away from our office in Gurugram. After visiting and spending time at 3 different printers, he almost figured this out. It was not perfect however it gave us the confidence to go ahead and offer it along with the pre-order. We had around a week more to perfect the font and final look.
This is what the results looked like at the end of that Saturday excursion Raghav undertook.
It is amazing the speed at which one gets the opportunity to execute at these early stages. Fast forward a couple of weeks and this is what our first shipment of personalized electric toothbrushes looked like (smart, sleek, and ready to meet its user) and that is our man Raghav right there.
Oh, of course, most of you must have seen it but for the others, this is what it finally ended up looking like.
I hope this gives you the final motivation to order your personalized toothbrush. We have extended personalization as a full time offering now after the overwhelming demand for it :)
We are quite proud of the little adventure we took with our pre-order and personalization. It is amazing to come in and work with a bunch of doers who won’t stop at anything. I am super glad we have that at Perfora.
On a side note, we did receive some really weird personalization requests. If you would like to know, do reply to this mail.
Continuing with book suggestions from our first letter, here are 2 of my favorites that have inspired me to start up and think about creating magic while building a brand.
Delivering Happiness - By Tony Hsieh | Story of Zappos
The Ride of a Lifetime - By Robert Iger | Story of the best creative years at Disney
If you would like to chat, learn more about what we are doing or share any feedback/suggestions, please feel free to reply to this email.
Have a chill Sunday!
Cheers,
Tushar
Co-founder, Perfora