Wed, Dec 21 2011
Now that the holidays are upon us, and you’ve finally finished your frantic shopping (or if you haven’t, Quirky.com offers overnight shipping!) let’s take a look back at the beginning of the holiday shopping season.
On Black Friday, forty-seven intrepid Quirky community members took to the streets to spread the word about Quirky to bargain-hungry shoppers, who were eagerly waiting to trample each other to get doorbuster deals at countless retail stores nationwide.
Armed with a stack of 500 idea submission cards (as seen above), a Quirky t-shirt and their personal experiences, our volunteers were tasked with getting as many people interested in Quirky as possible. Everyone had a unique idea submission coupon code printed on their cards, and at the end of the weekend, the community member who got the most idea submissions would win a $500 Quirky gift card.
Here are some of their stories.
Michelle Drake:
“I had a blast doing this, a very fun way to get the word out about Quirky.
I started out at Target in Huber Heights, Ohio, which went very well. Seems that the folks in the beginning of the line, who were probably getting bored of sitting around were more interested than those just showing up. Then, I moved on to HHGregg next door, which was also pretty good, but not nearly as long of a line. Next was Kohls and Elder Beerman, but it seemed that folks were just starting to show up there and not very interested, so I quickly moved on.”
Tammy Maddrey:
“The Black Friday adventure began at Toys R Us in Minnetonka (a nice suburb of Minneapolis) for their opening at 10pm. We arrived about 9:30 and were shocked at the size of the line. I’d say there were about 200 people there. We started at about the halfway mark of the line and worked backwards. Very quickly I got my story down to about four sentences. I started with the free code and then described what Quirky is and then talked about how my idea was selected. 9 out of 10 groups were very receptive and had a smile on their faces by the time I moved on. About half said congratulations and said they would love to buy my boot rack when available. A few people chased me down before I left to ask a few more questions.”
Paulette Jaques:
“I have an easy time talking to people, so I did get Quirky’s point across to many people.
I started with asking about if they ever had an idea and didn’t know what to do with it, and at least 8 out of ten always said yes, so I told them it’s so easy for it to come to life! I also told them, if they are not inventors, then they can vote on peoples ideas and give input, or, they can add help to product naming and tag lines…they were impressed!
Overall I think it was fun, it was hard to get some to listen because of the surrounding event, so I told them to go to Quirky.com and watch the video, and they will be hooked!”
Thanks to everyone who participated and congratulations to Michael Taylor and Paulette Jaques who were our joint winners for this endeavor. By the end of the weekend our community had hit 46 cities and towns in 21 states and handed out a total of 23,500 idea submission cards.
Here’s a look at some of our other community members’ experiences.
P.S. To the people who were anticipating this post for the better part of a month, my apologies for keeping you waiting for so long.
