Turning Old Stock Into $$$

Like any business, Rugby Bricks has products that are winners and losers.

The issue is that some of our losers were costing us so much in warehousing that it was becoming untenable to hold on to them.

We collectively had 7.2 years’ worth of stock on hand - not ideal.

So we made a plan.

Let’s discount the shit out of them and market them in a new way to get rid of them.

Here is what we did.

1. We set up a new product in our store called the “Mystery Box”

2. This mystery box included all of our slow-moving items bundled with a guarantee of getting at least one of our best-selling tees, the Rugby Bricks Vortex ($44.99).

   
   By doing this, we got people on the fence to spend another $30 to pick our slow movers.

3. We created FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out for our readers of a certain vintage) with four tactics:
   
   - Created a limited supply of 300 boxes across the UK & NZ
   - Created a time frame of four days to buy it over Kings Birthday Weekend
   - Talked about it as our only sale event outside of BFCYM this year
   - We added a discount page with all of the slow movers with 50 - 75% off on individual items too

4. We made the offer irresistible - We offered $220 worth of products for $75 with free shipping
   

5. Lastly, we called it a “Warehouse Sale” which implied we were on the move and going to miss out once we’d relocated

Notes: If you are having trouble selling something, try pitching it in a way that makes it more palatable for your buyer.

Price, exclusivity, deadlines, mystery, and FOMO are all levers that can be pulled when creating a new way to sell a product.

What Most Successful Businesses Have In Common

Every successful business I've seen behind the curtains of has built in word of mouth.

Tracplus, while I was working there as tech support, was almost all word of mouth.

50+% of our gym leads are from word of mouth.

25% of our Gravy clients are from word of mouth.

Even Rugby Bricks, a content-heavy eCom business, has a large word-of-mouth component.

You know what else these businesses have in common? Their word of mouth isn't happening by accident.

Sure, it does sometimes, in random flickers. But to expect word of mouth to just happen because you have a good product is a miss.

I made this mistake for yonks.

I bought Arrowtown Hair in 2016. I got lucky with an early hire, and it kind of took off. The soho mums of Arrowtown did what they do, and word spread quickly.

We had a stream of new clients telling us they came here because Sally recommended them—maybe a few a week. And I was stoked about that because I didn't know any better.

Then, two years in, I had a lightbulb (seems obvious now) moment: why don't we give out referral cards?

Life changed dramatically for our little salon after that. By the time I sold the place a year later, we were getting ten referrals a week.

The same thing happened at my gym. When we started a referral program, the number of referrals we got a week more than doubled.

I saw Rugby Bricks do something similar with their brand ambassadors program. In the few years since launching it, their #rugbybricks has been used 20,000 times and received 100+ million views.

Organic word of mouth is a sign of untapped potential that many businesses miss out on.

In all the cases I've been witness to, and I really mean all, the introduction of a referral program has at least doubled that business's word-of-mouth sales. And the right program does much more.