It’s the time of the year of the Office Holiday Grab-bag and the anxiety that goes along with it. There’s usually a budget and there’s always the reality of not really knowing your co-workers. What do you do? Where do you go? Is it possible to find great gifts without having to endure crowded stores? Yes! Luckily, Firebox.com, the best site for unique and affordable gadgets has made its US debut!
The site features many remote-controlled toys, fun items to add a little whimsy to your work-space or just about anything that’ll appeal to the kid in all of us. I sat down with co-founder of Firebox.com, Michael Smith and spoke about the humble beginnings of the site that almost wasn’t. There they were, two lads fresh from University with 1000 pounds of borrowed money, donated attic space and a whole lot of passion.
JY: You borrowed the money to start from your mother, right? Were there any conditions to pay her back?
MS: Only condition was to get out of the house; I guess I really should pay her back, but she’s never asked. And, Thom, my partner, his parents donated their attic for us work out of, where we were actually living, as well. It was pretty frustrating in the beginning, only selling to our friends and people we knew.
JY: Things looked pretty bleak? What turned things around for you?
MS: Our break through item, the Shot Glass Chess Board.
JY: How’d that idea come about?
MS: We were watching people doing tequila slammers at a bar and I’ve always loved chess. The way the shot glasses were lined up, it reminded us of chess and we thought “Brilliant! Why not combine the two?” We used different sized shot glasses to represent different chess pieces and added the twist that you have to drink the ones that you capture. So, if you’re doing really well, you are also getting very drunk, thereby giving your opponent a chance. Things really took off for us after that.
JY: You really have a wonderful variety on the website. When selecting products are there any set criteria?
MS:A bit, anything, as longs as it’s unusual, a bit quirky, a bit if a twist but most importantly, we’ve got to love it and that we, personally, want it; anything that sort of fits that very unscientific criteria can get on Firebox.com. We enjoy the very nice casualness about being online, because you can put up a product and if it doesn’t go well, you can just take it back down and no one really has to know. We can buy small quantities, where actual stores have to buy large quantities and often get stuck with product. It’s much easier for us.
MS:In the old days, we did it by knocking on doors and going to tradeshows around the world and scouring the internet and then we hit the tipping point where manufacturers started coming to us asking if we’d like to sell their product. It’s the Firebox effect in the UK that whenever Firebox starts promoting something, journalists want to cover it and traditional retailers often look to Firebox to see what’s going to be the next big thing. In 2004, we were ranked the 13th fastest growing in the UK. So, we’ve gone from traveling the world to sort of having the world come to us and created a virtual cycle of always being at the forefront.
JY:Which item is your favorite?
MS:Well, the Shot Glass Chess game will always hold a soft spot.
JY:Why’s that?
MS:We were on the verge of shutting down; we really hadn’t any funds for marketing…it was a really dark period…
JY:Where you drinking the shots without playing?
MS:Exactly! You know, two entrepenuers, with no where else to go…didn’t know what else to do. Until we got a ton of press for the Shot Glass Chess Game out of no where. The beauty of it is that it taught us that if you have a product that is quirky and unusual , something that no one’s ever seen before, the press will come to you. The press was literally calling us! Which was much more valuable than paying for it; consumers tend to believe that more. That’a the long answer…
I love all our remote-controlled stuff. We’ve lots of toy cars and now, the new helicopter which is perfect for flying around the office and driving other people crazy. We had a tiny digital camera 3 or 4 yrs ago, “The Blink”; it was the size of a credit card. Customers started sending us their photos and telling us what they’d been up to. Then the product that followed was an inexpensive video camera, the quality wasn’t that great but because people were using it for “on-line”, it didn’t really matter.
JY: The website encourages people to send in photos or videos of themselves actually using the product along with commentary. It’s like building a community amongst you custiomers.
MS:That’s the big thing now, sites that use user-generated content, but smart companies have been doing that for years. [On-line bookseller] is one that’s been encouraging users to write reviews ever since it first started. And that’s always been a really big thing about what we do.
JY:Do you find that’s even better than a text-only review because there’s more invested and they’ll be more likely to tell their friends, “Hey, go look at my photo on this site Firebox.com”?
MS:Yes, it does help to drive up the traffic to the site. The cool thing is, when you sell a product, the consumer takes it home and you don’t hear from them again. But with them posting to Firebox.com, you do get to see them using it as it’s meant to be used and even some alternative, weird and wonderful uses which encourages others to want to buy it more. As you say, a community.
JY: The timing of the US launch of Firebox.com is perfect for the gift-giving season. Was it planned that way?
MS It’s been in the plans for years. We’d been really successful growing Firebox.com in the UK, and always felt there was great opportunity for us in the US and saw that no one was really doing what we offer over here. With regard to gadgets, you’ve got super-geeky on one end, or [truly indulgent luxury] at the other. You’d think that’d be easy [lauching the site in the US] but there are a hell of lot of little things you must change, currency, slang, technical, back end things like taking in the money…so, now it’s all ready and it’s just been amazing. We had to sort of dampen down the press. The site nearly collapsed with all the US traffic. In fact, last week, we had more US visitors than UK, which is insane considering the UK site has been live for 7 years now.
Obviously, there are more customers here than in the UK, the propensity for buyers is greater, and thirdly, there are no direct competitors. As opposed to being cheap and cheery, our products are a bit more edgy and fun and of high quality. I figure long as we have the site live, keep product in stock, then we should be a big hit.
JY: I find the non-gender specific aspect appealing.
MS: I’m glad you said that because we used to be very male focused; our tagline used to be “Where men buy stuff”. Then realized that we were missing out on half the population when we received tons of email from women saying “How dare you be so sexist? We like gadgets.” And we became more gender neutral.
There was the mini-Winnie controversy [referring to a product that’s mostly, well, cute]. All the guys didn’t want it and all the girls at the office loved it, so to settle the argument, we put it up and it’s selling quite nicely. The girls were right.
JY: Have you found your Geography degree to come in handy?
MS: I took geography because someone told me it had the best looking girls and fewest hours of work…and I love maps, of course. In hindsight, if I had it to do it all over, I’d probably take something a bit more useful, like business, or psychology.
JY:Pyschology?
MS:Retail, when you boil it down, is really about what makes people tick. How you can write copy to elicit desire or demand, the subtle things. I think it would have helped. But then again, coming at it not knowing, we were free to do whatever and make mistakes, like a kid! With untainted eyes.
JY: It sounds like a prefect business partnership and that comradierie is reflected on the site with the baby photos of employees, in addition to the video customer commentary.
MS: Yes, we still live together, Thom and I, like when we were students, only much better. It’s an amazing partnership because he’s great at all the technical aspects; built the website, database, all the really complex things I’m clueless about, and I’m good at more of the product side, the PR and marketing. [It] works really, really well.
JY:You’ve said you’d be Firebox.com’s best customer, if you didn’t own it.
MS:Yes, we love the stuff we sell.
