Tom Montgomery describes how Chubbies Shorts' Facebook campaign promised free koozies at 50,000 fans and hit 75,000 instead. They had to ship 30,000 koozies but drastically underestimated postage costs and logistics. It took ten workers three weeks of manual packing to fulfill the promise.
So our first— can I say "oh shit" moment, or is that inappropriate? We were just getting our feet wet in the world of Facebook marketing, and we had this genius plan where we realized on Facebook we could pay a certain amount to acquire a fan. We found the price we could pay, then had this revelation that, you know, Shit, I can make a Styrofoam koozie for half that price. And shipping rates on just flat kind of envelopes are much, much less kind of added together than the price of acquiring one single fan on Facebook. Instead of running ads on Facebook, we would run an organic campaign that was share our page, and if our page hit 50,000 fans on Facebook, We're gonna send out koozies to everyone who signed up and shared our page. So we did it. We ran the campaign. We ended up getting to 75,000 fans, and we had to ship out 30,000 koozies. We thought, "Great, you know, let's just ship them out and we'll be done." But the process of shipping 30,000 koozies is no simple feat. We packed a koozie into an envelope, took it to the post office, and said, "Please ship this to XYZ address," with one single stamp on it. They rejected it and said we had to pay 5 times the price we were assuming we were gonna have to pay. So we started looking into the most advanced vacuum sealing technologies. We started trying to duct tape down all the envelopes. We started trying to use, like, vices to smush them down and somehow get them to hold. Nothing worked. Then we hired 10 contract workers just to come in and pack koozies into envelopes for probably about 3 weeks straight. That was our biggest "oh shit" moment. It was in the face of kind of, you know, a successful whole campaign. That was a huge realization of, wow, 30,000 is a humongous number, and you really need to do more research on the way in when you're doing things like that.
