Debbie Sterling: Scrappy Advertising Efforts

We invited our Kickstarter backers to the Toys R Us parking lot, and we said, hey, we're going to film a video together. And our idea was, if we want to tell the world that we're in Toys R Us, let's film a shot of a bunch of girls running through the pink aisle, screaming. So we invite our Kickstarter backers to the parking lot. About 50 people showed up, kids and their parents. We're getting ready to kind of get this stealth shot. And then the security guards start circling. I'm like, oh, my God, we're gonna, like, get arrested. So the manager of Toys R Us comes out with his clipboard, and they say, what's going on here? And so I told a little white lie, said we were the loveliest girls club on a field trip to the girls favorite place in the world, Toys R Us. And he said, oh, my gosh, why didn't you call me? I hope we have enough gift bags. He runs in, comes back out with Jeffrey the giraffe handing gift bags out to the girls, announcing us, welcoming us in. We set up our video equipment, get the shot, posted the video on YouTube, and we got about a million views. And the story broke that goldieblox broke into Toys R Us. And it went viral. And all of a sudden, sales started to pick up. And so we kept trying to figure out ways, like, how do we. Even though we're this teeny, tiny team, we're only five people, how do we get the word out? And we found out about a contest being run by Intuit where one small business had the chance to win a free super bowl commercial. So I'm like, okay, there's our national TV advertising. We got to win this. And so, again, it sounds crazy, like, how could we win a Super bowl commercial? But we just put it on the wall and we said, this is our goal. And our team of five people every single day tried to get creative of how are we going to win this? And so we emailed our Kickstarter backers, we emailed our fans, just begged every day, vote for us, vote for us, vote for us. And sure enough, out of 30,000 small businesses who applied, GoldieBlox was the grand prize winner. And so we had a commercial in the Super Bowl.