As playful as this phrase sounds, it is the name of a company. And it is anything but fun and games when you listen to Lolly Wolly Doodle’s story. Lolly Wolly Doodle is an e-commerce business that offers customizable children’s clothing on-demand. But the real story is now what they do, but how they do it. It makes for a great case study on both business model development and demand generation model creation. Inc. Magazine recently provided a full history and profile on the company and its founder, where you can enjoy the serendipity of how it all came together. It will no doubt leave you cheering.
Figuring out your business model and figuring out your demand generation model have a key commonality. In both cases, you don’t know what is going to work until you actually do it. In the case of the Lolly Wolly Doodle’s demand generation model, it uses Facebook to gauge the real demand for new styles. And then scales up its efforts around the popular designs.
The great irony of the situation is that the company had only sold its ware on eBay while working out of the home garage. But faced with a batch of dresses that were subpar in quality, and not wanting negative feedback on eBay, the dresses needed to be offered at clearance pricing through a different channel. So they were offered up to a small lot of Facebook fans (153 of them in total) who had signed up at local Junior League events. Amazingly, the dresses sold out within minutes. The channel was then tested again with various designs that could be made to order, and the pace of sales continued. This was not a fluke. Within a couple of months, eBay was no longer a channel.
From a demand generation perspective, the eBay channel was doing just fine. The reputation was deemed the key metric, and the entrepreneur only turned to an alternate channel so as not to damage this reputation. But that alternate channel, Facebook, even with a small number of fans, leveraged itself by the sharing effect that occurred. And this is what moved Lolly Wolly Doodle to the next level. It had inadvertently found a way to match its products in the ideal context, the Facebook News Feed. This became like Tupperware parties on steroids. I can’t get over the irony of how it occurred. But the fact of the matter is that finding the right channel, where the context matches your offering, and people will give up their attention span, is the real nirvana of a demand generation model.
From a business model perspective, the company had effectively hit the fashion industry where it was weakest. It found a way to offer customizable children’s clothing on-demand. Whereas, the fashion business is all tied to high volumes, with lags in the ability to adjust to changing preferences. Again, the company’s on-demand model, the supply-chain model, and the manufacturing model, all evolved from the roots of business. That is, don’t waste material, but find a way to repurpose it. And organize the production by the type of process (i.e. similar cuts, or similar sewing), rather than by specific garment batches. And it all evolved from the genuine need to do things efficiently, economically, and have fast turn-around, while not being stuck with conventional processes.
This story can serve to inspire us all. You need to experiment with your demand generation techniques in order to know how it really is going to turn out. And you need to look for ways to do business that may not have been considered. If your offering has a solid value proposition, getting that message out in the right context can be truly transformational.