What I learnt from running an internet of things pop-up shop

Today was the last day of Works(Shop) which I’ve been running in my office on most Fridays & Saturdays since end of August. It’s been a very interesting experiment in what the retail experience of consumer internet of things products is about. We went on the road too, showing the products to the British Computing Society, in the Science Museum during an event organised by Flexeye, one of my clients and at Thingmonk where I was a speaker. The clear winners in terms of sales were Little Printers, Bare Conductive kits and a late comer Moistly. Here’s what I think they did right: cute & often self-explanatory packaging or demos. Selling is an emotional exercise. People often buy for others more than they buy for themselves. I used to work in a local art store in Canada as a student, I know.

Bare’s packaging is exquisite. People didn’t care much for what they were buying, they just bought them because it felt instantly that this would be fun and something good for the kids. They’ve thought about this a lot it’s clear and it pays off.

For Little Printer, I’d selected specifically non-geek content to showcase as I knew the people who might buy it would be interested in giving it to someone else or convincing a sceptical loved one of its value. Showing them a publication that showed the current value of bitcoin wouldn’t have helped in that case.

The “For Dummies” books weren’t popular strangely. I think it might be that the brand doesn’t appeal to a geek audience even if the books are awesome (my friends wrote most of the ones we sold). Someone also remarked that if they were going to get their daughter involved, to buy a book “for dummies” wasn’t very encouraging. I agree. Maybe Wiley should have a sub-brand for kids, same content, just a different cover or something.

Finally pricing was really key in the success of Moistly. It was cheap. £13 for a little bit of intelligence when it comes to your plants. Easy. No brainer. It’s hard to do when you’re a startup but it works.

All in all, I’m happy to have done it and allowed products to find new audiences and learn about what I should be doing to get Good Night Lamp to be presented in the best possible light. And it was fun to work with SuperNova studio on this as they designed an awesome brand for it.