On January 10, 2011, a huge, crippling ice storm hit Atlanta. We found ourselves snowed in for several days, wishing instead we were strolling along the beach in flip flops. At 3 a.m. on the second night of our imprisonment, we were sound asleep when suddenly both of the dogs went berserk, started barking hysterically, and raced each other to the living room. I got up to calm them down, thinking maybe an icy tree limb had fallen and the noise had startled them.
Ka-Rapp! Someone was peering in the windows off the front porch! Panicked, I ran back to the bedroom.
"Karen," I whispered fearfully, "there's someone on the front porch!"
"Ummmppphhh," she replied. Karen is a sound sleeper.
I shook her. "Wake up! There's someone on your front porch!"
My pulse was racing. The dogs were still barking furiously.
"What? Huh? Call 911!" She was suddenly wide awake, but obviously not thinking clearly!
"There's an ice storm, silly. They won't get here in time to save us!"
"Well, go see who it is, silly!"
Darn. Why do I always have to be the brave one?
I slithered back to the front door and in my deepest, manliest voice, shouted, "Who's there? What do you want?"
A soft, mild-mannered, man's voice replied, "It's Pete, from across the street. Frances's husband died and Tom and I don't know what to do with the body. We need Karen to come and help us." And so began a long, sad, funny, freezing cold night full of some of our first LAFF moments.
The ice storm had covered everything with a three-inch thick, solid blanket of ice. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was moving, especially Frances' poor dead husband. She didn't want to call anyone until her children could come and say their last goodbyes, but the children -- grown adults -- lived 40 miles away. It would be impossible for them to travel on the icy roads. Karen finally talked her into allowing us to call 911, although the poor man had passed hours ago.
And so, along came Dekalb County's finest: a fire truck with lights ablaze and wailing sirens, three EMTs, two police cars, and a hearse. In the fiasco that followed, the fire truck got stuck in the ice and couldn't move, so they called the salt truck. The salt truck slid into the police car and knocked off the rear bumper. The Dekalb County policeman couldn't decide if he should give the Dekalb County salt truck driver a ticket or not. The hearse was actually an SUV driven by two men in crisp black suits, starched white shirts, somber ties, and rubber booties. What a night! Karen stayed with Frances until late the next morning, and Pete and Tom took turns relieving her until Frances' children finally arrived several days later. A few weeks later, Frances called Karen and said, "I want you to know how much it meant to me that you came and made me laugh, in spite of everything." This tiny, 86-year old woman had just validated Karen's idea for Life's A Flip Flop, LAFF in spite of everything.
No, starting a business is not that dangerous, but read on!
We had planned a Girl's Gone Wild poker party one night in late February. We thought it would be a good idea to take the dogs for a long walk to tire them out before the guests arrived. But, when we got back from the walk, as I went to the mailbox, Karen's dogs jumped out of the car and headed down the hill to my neighbor's house to visit with the dogs next door. Suddenly, I heard a horrible howling, screaming, crying, wailing dog. I ran around the side of the house and saw Karen on her knees trying to pry open the neighbor's dog's mouth, which was wrapped around Karen's dog's muzzle through the fence. It was Skittles who was screaming. Karen was beating the dog's head, but it wouldn't let go. I ran down the hill and hit the dog with my brand new Apple Macbook Air and it finally let go of Skittles. I turned to grab Skittle's collar to calm her down, and GRRR! SNAP! OUCH! She bit me! I know she didn't mean it. She was frantic with pain and just lashed out at the first thing that came near her.
We were all a mess; Skittle's nose was covered in blood, my hand was covered in blood, and Karen's hands were covered in blood. We didn't know how bad we were hurt or how bad Skittles was hurt, but we got both dogs back into the house and finally took a deep breath and assessed the damage. I almost fainted when I saw my hand. I had a deep, red gash the size of a dog's fang on my left hand. Karen's hadn't fared any better. Her ring finger on her right hand looked like it had been chewed by an angry dog. In fact, it had been chewed by an angry dog!
"Karen," I said, holding my left hand high in the air and hanging on to the kitchen sink to keep from falling over, "I think we need to go to the Minute Clinic."
"The Minute Clinic?" She looked at me as if I was stupid. "Are you stupid? We can't drive to the Minute Clinic! We need an ambulance! Call 911!"
Okay, so it's February 26, we've known each for not quite three months and we're calling 911 for the second time? I've never been in an ambulance before. I've never been in an emergency room for my own emergency before. Heck, I've never been in a hospital for anything in my entire life! What am I getting into, here?
Karen's hand got infected and she had to have surgery and I have a really cool fang-shaped scar on my hand, but we both eventually recovered.
In March, Karen took on a new role at Corporate America which she just knew she would love. I went to England to attend the funeral of my mother's sister's husband. The night before the funeral, my mother's sister got really ill with pancreatitis, ended up the hospital, and missed the funeral. It was very sad.
On March 25, on a magnificent spring day, we placed our first order for LAFF products while sitting outside having lunch at Peachtree Dekalb Airport. We high-fived over our draft Guinness beers as we calmly ordered 500 pairs of LAFF flip flops, which would take eight weeks to be delivered from China. As budding entrepreneurs and right-brained creative types, we were constantly coming up with new ideas for products. Over the next few weeks, we also ordered 432 color tee shirts, 288 gray tee shirts, 900 bandanas, 432 hats, 400 tote bags, 500 magnets, and a partridge in a pear tree. By golly! We wanted to be ready when Life's A Flip Flop went viral! We would have enough inventory to last through the summer, at least!
While we waited for the inventory to arrive, we set up an office, built our inventory room, bought supplies, and continued to work on our website and order fulfillment processes. We opened accounts with American Express, USPS, BigCommerce, iContact, SurveyMonkey, and LegalZoom. And we kept coming up with even greater ideas for products that we knew our customers would just adore!
One fine day in mid-April, we were strolling through a arts and crafts shop and a small, rustic-looking wooden picture frame caught our eye. We picked it up and examined it more closely. It was nothing more than three pieces of old painted wood fastened together on the back with some cheap pine wood strips, attached with nails. A three inch dowel rod was sticking out the bottom to prop it up on a shelf. On the front was a piece of plexiglass on top of some distressed, painted plywood and some odd-looking fasteners to hold in the plywood and the plexiglass. It was priced at $49.95!!! We looked at each other and at the exact same moment said, "We can make these!"
Later, as we lunched at an outdoor cafe on Canton Street in downtown Historic Roswell, our creative brains ran amok over the chilled Chardonnay. We could make the frames and people could send us pictures of themselves and their friends in great LAFF moments and we could print out the pictures and put them in the frames and send them to their friends for $45 which is cheaper than that cheap looking frame we just saw and we would sell a million of them because it's such a cool idea and we'll be rich and do you think we should do it? Well, as frequently happens with budding entrepreneurs and right-brain creative types, we probably got distracted by something else and forgot about the frames.
Or, at least, Karen forgot. I didn't. While she was away at the beach with her friends for her birthday, I made her a frame. And put the ultimate Life's A Flip Flop photo in it. And so began our LAFF Frames adventure!We scoured the Craigslist ads looking for old repurposed barn wood and found a guy selling a huge pile of it for just $140. It took us two days and six trips from Dahlonega to Roswell, but we finally got it all home in Karen's old Toyota 4Runner. We bought sheets of birch plywood from Home Depot. We bought reams of canvas paper to print the logo on. We bought hundreds of pieces of glass. We bought thousands of odd-looking fasteners to hold the plywood and the glass. We bought dozens of cans of spray paint and stain and experimented with myriad color combinations. We bought a new table saw and a drill press and set up shop in my garage.
While I power-washed the wood, cut it to size, and screwed (not nailed) it together with strips of pine, Karen sanded and spray painted the birch ply mattes and stained the frames. We made dozens and dozens! Of every color combination you can imagine! We searched through our photo libraries, Facebook pages, and Google Images to find funny photos that epitomized the types of pictures we knew people would want to send each other. We couldn't believe how great the frames turned out! We took pictures of the pictures in the picture frames and got them all ready to sell in our new online website! Being an entrepreneur is fun!In May, Skittles got diagnosed with cancer and had to have surgery and chemotherapy. Katie, Karen's 12-year old Shepard-mix, blew out her ACL chasing a squirrel and started walking on three legs. Violent tornadoes ripped through Alabama and Georgia. And, on May 25, 500 pairs of flip flops arrived on our front porch. Followed shortly thereafter by boxes and boxes of tee shirts, hats, bandanas, magnets, cards, and packing supplies. We bought every plastic storage box we found on sale, sorted and folded and cataloged and prepared for the big opening day!
On June 14, 2011, we launched www.lifesaflipflop.com!!! We were so happy, we went out for margaritas and over-tipped the waitress! Hey! We're entrepreneurs! Life is good! (OOOOPS! Did I just say that? Blasphemy!) Life's A Flip Flop and it was pretty flipping' good! I can't tell you how excited we were the next day when my iPhone beeped, I check my email, and we had our first order! WOW!!! What a rush! What excitement! Who cares if the order was from Karen's mother! We rushed to the inventory room, packed up our first little package, worked through our shipping process, and promptly drove the package to the post office. We could have driven a few more miles and delivered the package in person, but it felt so much like a real business when we dropped our Priority Mail packages at the Post Office!
We were having so much fun at our LAFF business that Karen started to really dislike her job at Corporate America. While I was having a blast tweaking images for the website, researching the best email marketing software, and collaborating with fellow bloggers, Karen was tweaking Excel spreadsheets, researching how to make customers seem happy with their financial products, and collaborating with fellow employees who feared massive layoffs. So, two weeks after we launched www.lifesaflipflop.com, Karen resigned from Corporate America to work full time on LAFFing, in spite of everything!
In our first two weeks, we got nine more orders, all of them Karen's close personal friends. But, that was good! We always said we wanted to grow the business organically, spreading the good news by word of mouth, Facebook, and our own personal networks. We secretly want it to go viral, since we have all that inventory, but we have to be realistic. It will take more than a cool logo and a good story to make it go viral. What we need are customers who love our products and who tell other people about them.
Some of our ideas are better than others, too. A good friend of ours is a veteran of the 3-Day Walk for the Cure. She walks with a team of 50 or so other people trying to raise awareness and money to find a cure for breast cancer. At the beginning of August, she asked us if her team could sell our products at various fund-raisers. Sure! That seemed like a great idea! But, you know how us budding entrepreneurs and right-brain creative types are! We can't just go with the first idea we come up with! We have to expand on it! Before we knew it, we went from providing a bunch of products to a friend to hosting a golf tournament called LAFF for the Cure!!!!
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a no-brainer, the ease of execution of providing products to a friend is probably a 0. Hosting a charity golf tournament is a 37! Neither Karen nor I have ever hosted, sponsored, or otherwise tried to have a golf tournament, although we have both played in many of them over the years. We knew instinctively that we needed to create a memorable experience for everyone involved in the tournament, from the players to the sponsors to the golf course staff. And, that...we did!
To say that it felt like a success to us would be an understatement! It felt like a bigger accomplishment than even launching www.lifesaflipflop.com! We were able to focus our efforts on a single event and raise quite a lot of money to give to an extremely worthy cause. Although we did it with some ups and downs -- and flips and flops -- we ended up feeling nothing less than fulfilled at being able to doing something good and give something back.
Since the tournament in October, we continue to try and refine the purpose and the direction of Life's A Flip Flop. We may be budding entrepreneurs, but we're still novices after all! There is so much to learn about every aspect of the business, from email marketing and search engine optimization to the imprintable apparel industry and wholesale purchasing.
One day, we ventured downtown to the Atlanta Apparel Mart, a confusing complex of three cavernous buildings with miles of hallways, thousands of vendor's stores, and millions of products. This is where buyers from any store, gift shop, or website can go look at products from all over the world, meet with the vendors, and place their orders. The Atlanta Apparel Mart holds specialty shows every few weeks, featuring different product lines like apparel or gifts or carpets or home goods. On the day we went, there was no show, but some of the vendors were supposed to be open. We registered at the front desk of one of the buildings, took an elevator to one of seven floors featuring "Gifts" and started wandering down the hallway. But something didn't seem right. There was no one around! Karen and I were the only ones there, walking down dimly lit hallways and peering into darkened store fronts. We wandered and wandered and wandered! We turned this way and that way and got turned around and backtracked and got turned around again. Even my normally excellent sense of direction was confused. I didn't know where we were, where we'd been, or how in the heck we were going to get out of there! Every hallway led to another hallway. The elevators went no where. The doors to the stairs were locked! I was honestly starting to panic, and my feet hurt! But Karen was like a little kid with a stolen credit card in a candy store. "Oh, look at these flip flop note cards. We should get some of those!" "Check out those flip flop boxers! They would look good with the gray tee shirts" "Ooooh! How cute are those flip flop ornaments! We should get some for Christmas" "Oh, I love that flip flop lamp shade! Isn't that great?"
"Karen, we're lost. They're going to close this place and we're going to get stuck in here and no one is going to know we're here."
"Oh, don't be silly. Look at this over here...."
I hate being called silly. "Karen, come on!"
"We're fine, silly! Just look at this a minute. You know, we could create a new LAFF kit with these and package them with the LAFF frames and..."
Did I mention I hate being called silly? "Good-bye. You're on your own." I turned to leave.
"Wait! Look at this. This is really cool! People will love this!"
"Karen, this entire place is filled with stuff people would love. Even if we could buy everything we wanted, we still need people to buy. We don't need products, silly We need customers! We shouldn't be here being buyers of someone else's products, we should be trying to figure out how to get more buyers for our products!"
"But..."
"No 'buts'...."
"I know. You're right. But this is so much fun!"
"No 'buts!' You said 'but'! But, you're right, too. This is the fun part. But, let's get the heck out of here and go have a Guinness and figure out how to get more customers."
We've probably had a conversation something like this at least once a week since we opened the business. Do we invest in expanding our product line so our existing customers buy more from us? Or, do we invest in expanding our customer base so they can buy our existing products? Or, is there some strategy we're missing? We still don't know the answer to this question that must surely puzzle every budding entrepreneur who has ever launched a business.
We decided to focus on a hybrid business model: getting our existing customers to buy more of our existing inventory while at the same time expanding the inventory of things they could buy and expanding our customer base.
Perfect! Let's order some more products! But what to order? Let's ask our customers, silly! (Are we smart, or what?) We sent out a little survey in November to our marketing email list, which we have been cultivating since early in the year. A lot of the names on the list are our personal friends, but we also added people from our LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter connections. And, when someone sends us an email with a bunch of names in the cc: list, we grab those names, too, and add them to our marketing email list. This is known as growing organically! (If you think we're spamming, don't worry. People can unsubscribe with one click. We get dozens of emails a day from companies we've never heard of. If we don't want to get them anymore, we simply unsubscribe.)
Wow! By now it's almost Thanksgiving and everyone...I mean everyone....is having a Black Friday sale. Hey! We can do that! Heck, we can do better than that! We can have a Black Friday through Cyber Monday sale! Our customers should be flocking to the website for 25% discounts on our existing products plus free shipping on orders over $50! That's what everyone else is doing so why shouldn't we? So, we spent a day or three taking new pictures of all our products wrapped in their holiday finest, updating the website, figuring out how to offer free shipping discounts, and creating an email campaign to send out to our marketing email list. We probably put 40 hours of work into our Black Friday through Cyber Monday promotion. We were absolutely positive that we'd see an uptick in sales!
On Black Friday, we heard no beeps on the iPhone to signal a new order. None on Saturday. None on Sunday. None on Cyber Monday. Our very first Black Friday through Cyber Monday sale was a bust! So, we had a great idea! Let's extend it through the end of the year! Yeah! A storewide discount of 25% plus free shipping for any orders over $50! Send out another email and let everyone know! Surely that promotion will start a flood of orders!
We got three orders in December. From repeat customers! They ordered the new products! Our strategy is working! We hope!
Seriously. We hope our strategy is working. There is nothing we would like more than to be able to offer great products that our customers want at a reasonable price so we can use the profits to sponsor golf tournaments and other charity events and give something back to the planet. Seriously. That's what we've figured out in our inaugural year. We're not trying to be fabulously wealthy. We're not trying to grow an empire. We can imagine how different our lives would be if Life's A Flip Flop really did go viral and we don't think we like the vision of a global, viral phenomenon called LAFF. Unless, of course, that's what you, our dear customer, wants for us! Then we'll be happy to step up to the plate!
So, that's what we're looking to do in 2012. For all of you who have supported us in our first half-year of business, we sincerely thank you. We couldn't have done it without you. We don't want to do it without you going forward! We want you to tell us what you want, tell us how we're doing, and tell us how we can do better. We're committed to living our vision. We truly hope you'll choose to live it with us.
Happy New Year!
Debra Partridge and Karen Guest
Managing Partners
Life's A Flip Flop
www.lifesaflipflop.com
