I’ve been a designer for 30 years and freelance for the last 20. During down-time I always tinker with new ideas. A couple of those ideas turned into licensed products. For the the last five years or so I’ve become semi-retired since the royalties are enough to support me and to continue tinkering.
In semi-retirement I’ve been doing a lot of mountain biking and I get to ride on a bike I designed for Ellsworth.
This product I can’t deny is a little silly and fun. I tried to talk myself out of doing it because of many fears of it not working and not having experience selling my own thing. I kept at it and applied for a patent and had the tooling made locally. Then friends helped with the website and packaging.
I watched the Core77 series for product lunches and funding. I had enough saved to go for it.
Here is my silly product for “elevating your ride”
Head shops may be a fruitful channel. I’d figure most larger cities have chains which might buy enough to make individual sales pitches worthwhile. If a version of the packaging omitted direct reference to cannabis it could go into shops in most states.
Thanks for the advice! One of the tricks is that it sits in-between a smoke shop and a bike shop. I’ve been to a few of each and get a confused look. There are a few I need to target that are in biking destinations.
So far most of the roughly 40 orders have come from this blog post on 4-20:
I’m feeling like I’m back in school always needing to do something and procrastinating. A part of me wants to leave it alone and let the orders trickle in. One day it might catch on.
I’ve been amazed how simple the process is once it was set up. I use Stamps.com and woo commerce and the fulfillment process I do by myself is slick!
I could see those two specialty shops being confused… there are a lot of dispensaries here in Oregon. Maybe dispensaries that happen to be near mountain resorts that are mountain bike destinations? Maybe bike shops in states with a big 420 culture? I could see this in Portland, Eugene, Hood River bike shops here in Oregon!
But I could see online direct doing well. And if that business builds it could provide some data to show the bike shops how popular it is?
I don’t know if cross-border shipping may cause issues, but have a search for dispensaries between North Vancouver and Whistler, BC - I’m not a mountain biker, but the North Shore is practically Mecca, and with respect to cannabis - it’s BC, heh. Maybe there’s opportunities for partnership there?
@ Scott, A guy in Squamish BC bought some wholesale and I went to visit. It was kind of a pain to ship them there. They’re only $20 so not really worth it yet. Maybe if I had a distributor or something like that. Also, I found that people there are biking at such a high level they’re not so interested getting high:)
@_YO I really need to focus more on Oregon and especially Bend. One of the reasons I did the project was to be able to travel around and do some sales and biking. That hasn’t really gone as planned but it’s just getting started!
Nice packaging and interesting product!
I have seen several skate/bike/weed shops in California that I can see being interested in selling your product! There is actually one right next to my house!
