As kids my sister, cousin, and myself would play store where we would make crafts out of origami, beads and the like and sell our wares to my parents, aunt, uncle, and to our grandparents. We named our store ZSS, standing for Zach, Sara, and Susie. They had to buy our products of course, but that desire to own my own business and selling products of my own never left my mind, despite the twists and turns life took to get there.
In 2015, while I was still living and working in Saudi Arabia, I stumbled on a course that taught people how to sell products on Amazon. The course was designed and run by a person named Jim Cockrum. He focused on helping people learn the basics of selling on Amazon with minimal upfront investment. I was interested, but back in the mid 2010’s it wasn’t feasible to get the business going remotely living abroad, so I kept it in the back of my mind.
I found an opportunity to open up shop in 2023 just after my daughter turned two and my wife, daughter and I finished our trip around the world. I had ramped my coursework up at grad school finishing up my degree in Human Factors in Information Design, but since I had left my job at Intralinks, I still had some time to focus on researching, designing and developing a physical product.
I started out small, finding success selling replenishable items on Amazon as I learned the system and refined my sourcing, packaging and shipping processes. Once, I’d sold close to $20,000 of product per month, I felt like I was ready to venture into creating my own products. Jim Cockrum and his coaching team proved integral yet again, linking me up with John VanDerMeulen, a consultant who specializes with helping people identify, launch, and optimize selling products on Amazon.
Our first call was invigorating. He gave a brief overview of his backstory then outlined the key areas we’d focus on throughout the process:
Obviously, there are a lot of substeps I’m omitting but he gave me an overview and tour of the spreadsheet he uses and provides his mentees for evaluating the viability of products, including the amount of searches the main keyword and the supplementary keywords get per month, the estimate cost of manufacturing the product, the potential selling price of the product, the estimated shipping cost, the current competitiveness of other listings, and the customizability of the product. The key to getting all of this data was SaaS software called Helium 10. There were 20+ sub-applications related to different parts of the product launch lifecycle I wouldn’t be using but identifying product leads was also a good introduction to the software I’d be using for much of the process.
It was as much of an idea generation exercise as I’d ever done. I didn’t start from a completely blank slate, since I had a few ideas, but our initial goal was for me to come up with ~20 products I felt had a real chance of being sellable. I’d rank the products before our next meeting and then John would grade them with me on a scale of 1-10 on how viable or potentially successful they could be for me to sell.
I’m a naturally competitive person so I didn’t anticipate searching for product leads being as fun as it was. It helped that I felt like I found some success right away, looking at organization systems for home goods. That led me to door mounted organization systems, then to fabric privacy curtains and holding systems for food and beverage pairings. It wasn’t until I was looking at classroom organization systems that I stumbled upon wedding card boxes as a potential product. I delved in further and found that wooden wedding card boxes had it’s own huge subset of associated keywords.
When it came time to rank ideas John acknowledged that there were a few viable candidates but he ranked the card boxes as the top idea to pursue. There were a number of attractive features about the product, it sold at the correct price point, it was relatively cheap to manufacture, it had a wide potential for customizability, there weren’t thousands of reviews for one or two products that dominated the market, only one box on the market had greater than a 4.4 star rating, and there were a slew of suppliers I could contact.
We agreed that I’d send out a few requests to suppliers and wait to hear back. Predictably, many of them replied immediately, eager for new business. Per John’s advice I engaged in an in depth discussion with the 5 suppliers I felt were the best fit, not just to gauge whether they could provide the type of box I wanted, but more to gauge their willingness to communicate and customize the box according to my needs.
During this communication process I identified the wooden card boxes that sold the most and delved into their design and their reviews, making a list of both the positive and negative aspects of each box. A few of the major issues I found were that people weren’t enthusiastic about assembling the box themselves with some people mentioning that it was a very difficult process where they needed a third hand. Other people mentioned that boxes got chipped in shipping and that the slot was too thin for their guests to put the card in the slot.
Two suppliers emerged as the most likely to provide the type of box I wanted so I gave them the specifications, example images, and guidelines then waited for them to send their samples. This was still part of my ideation process so I experimented a bit with a few different styles of box based one what was on the market on my major keyword being ‘wooden wedding card box.
(Need photographs of all 4 sample boxes currently in the closet)
My major competitor, and the wooden card box that sold the most by far, was a dark brown box that people assembled themselves. I bought it and assembled it in my kitchen. It was made of flimsy plywood that chipped easily and fit together kind of like Lincoln logs. The top was warped too which made it very difficult to assemble, but didn’t seem to affect the look once put together. I couldn’t believe it was even rated at 4.3 stars. It had a few copycats with minor variations but John and I agreed that based on the reviews, it was probably best from a customer service standpoint to have the box ship and arrive preassembled.
It took two weeks to get the samples but the second one that arrived seemed like far better quality wood and it was manufactured with more precision. I had communicated better with them too. I met with John again. He agreed, but this was where our processes diverged. He was used to placing an order right and initiating the product page creating cycle on Amazon.
I had worked in UX for too long and had gotten through too much of grad school to not test and idea so I logged onto my account on UserInterviews.com and initiated a plan to interview five people. My overall goal was to check the direction I was heading with the ideas I’d already generated for the wooden wedding card box.
Since I was designing a wedding card box my primary audience were the brides who would be potentially purchasing or at least would be the final decision maker for the wedding box purchase. My rationale for the questions were as follows:
I’d never used user interviews for such a specific subset of people so I was unsure how long it would take to find acceptable candidates. Either I was lucky or the pool of candidates was far wider than I thought because I started getting candidates that fit my criteria within hours. I had scheduled five interviews by the same time the next day for the following week, with a few more people lined up should some in the first batch cancel.
My plan was as such. I’d warm them up by asking them to tell me about their wedding, delving into how many people they expected to be there, whether they used a wedding planner, and whether they had a theme, then I’d review the pre-interview task I set for them asking them to draw their reception area in a back of the napkin style sketch. The pre-interview task is meant to be a bit fun, but also to get the participant’s minds in their reception planning mindset. If they didn’t complete the task, it wouldn’t make a huge difference for the rest of the interview, but it did help prime them and allowed me to ask more pointed questions about the accessories they planned on using and about the wedding card box they planned on using. My follow follow up questions after asking them to describe the type of wedding box they plan on having were:
I asked broader questions then delved into more pointed questions as is industry, practice, in such interview interviews but I am a believer in asking, a broad question that asked participants to use their imagination or use visualization skills first, search is asking participants to describe the type of wedding box they planned on having. I believe that reduces the amount of bias. I’m priming them with my questions and it’s interesting to hear participants list important qualities and features before they see any material.
Then I shared and gave control of my screen and we went through a couple of the Amazon pages of boxes I had identified as primary competitors. My major goal was to examine what they thought of the boxes themselves in the specific features that differentiated each box such as size, color, materials, latches and lettering. Then we delve into what they thought of the cost of the box, how they examined reviews and what they thought of the reviews of the specific box. My specific line of questioning for each box was as such:
After we went through the fourth Amazon box I minimized my chrome browser and said that I had created a page with images of all the boxes we had viewed plus a few other boxes, then ask them to rank the boxes one through eight with one being the highest and eight being the lowest. Aside from figuring out which boxes they like the most my goal was to identify the specific qualities that made different boxes, more or less attractive, essentially ranking the importance of the box qualities as well. To assess I asked a number of follow up questions:
Once I got the answers I sought I asked my final box question whether they cared about the interiors of the box being finished vs. unfinished then whether they had anything else to share that we hadn’t covered today before thanking them for their time and assuring them that I would mark the session as complete.
In total, I conducted six user interviews over the course of a week, which in aggregate prevented me from making a slew of enormous mistakes. My biggest lessons were:
Although people liked the idea of using real wood for the wedding card boxes, most of the participants wanted the box to be painted white rather than the brown paint or stain almost all of the wooden card boxes sold on Amazon were. Many of them thought that a brown wooden box would be good for a more rustic wedding venue, like one in a barn, but it wasn’t the vibe they were going for.
Every participant hated the font I’d chosen of the ‘Cards’ text for the sample boxes and they loved the ‘Cards’ text of my bestselling major competitor.
If the participants could make the box white, they were split on the color of the text. The participants who had gold as a primary color in their wedding wanted the lettering to be gold. A couple other participants thought black would look better. One participant who wanted gold did acknowledge that black lettering would be more versatile if they didn’t have gold in their color palette. One other participant did note that she did not want any words on the card box.
Four out of the six participant wanted there to be a lock on the box so badly that even if they loved everything else about a box, they would refuse to purchase it if there was no way to put a lock on it. It didn’t have to be a large or secure lock, but it needed to be something more than a latch. (A side note was when I mentioned this to my sister who lived and was getting married in Israel, she mentioned that all wedding card boxes at Israeli weddings had a lock.) One participant told a story where she went to a friend’s wedding and her friend’s uncle stole money out of the unlocked wedding box. Thankfully, they knew who did it immediately and got the money and cards back before he made it out the door.
Even when I asked a follow-up question of opening up the box as a workaround, many participants showed real signs of distress that their guests would be able to open the box at all. Related to this, most brides to be didn’t care whether the box was painted on the interior since none of their guests would see the interior of the box.
Most brides had a plan for emptying the wedding card box periodically throughout the reception with the majority tagging their mother with the task. The only woman I spoke with who just had her wedding said that she did get a box with a lock on it, lost the key to the lock during the reception, and was struggling to finagle the box open with a bobby pin on her wedding night. She said, “I thought that it was a flimsy looking lock but I couldn’t get it open with the bobby pin, so maybe it wasn’t as flimsy as I thought. Apparently a guest found it on the ground and handed it to my husband during the reception.”
The two participants who didn’t want the box with a lock liked my major competitor’s latchless, jigsaw assembled box. One of them noted that although they didn’t want a box with a lock they understood why someone would want to have a lock on the box.
It was important to have a long and wide slot to put the cards into so guests weren’t struggling to put their cards in and since there would be a lock, they wouldn’t be able to open the box.
None of the participants minded assembling the box themselves. One of them preferred to have it shipped to her preassembled but it wasn’t a deal-breaker if she had to do it herself.
There was a strong preference for a short squat box over a tall thin box. One participant noted that they could see cards stacking nicely in a squat box and thought the cards would get damaged if they were upright, with people trying to stuff more cards.
Participants loved how my major competitor gave a size reference for their box by taking a picture of it on a chair. They also liked how competitors had an image with the dimensions of the boxes, but many were unable to visualize the size of the box without an external reference.
Every participant looked at the reviews on Amazon before purchasing the box, but many gave the reviews a cursory glance. A number of the participants also gave a fair bit of leeway for items having negative reviews for assembly issues, nicks and scratches. Many did like and look for pictures and videos in the reviews, feeling they gave a far more realistic representation of what the boxes looked like in a comparable setting.
The prices of the boxes I showed people ranged from $24.99 to $39.99 but price didn’t seem to be an enormous barrier or a deciding point on whether they would choose one box over another. A number of people noted that it mattered far more whether the box matched their theme than saving a few dollars on the cost of the item.
I was glad I created the final step of the interview, asking participants to rank boxes one to seven while talking aloud giving their reasoning.
Here is an example of one participant’s ranking:
There was remarkable consistency in participants ranking, with the second ranked box for this participant ranking as the top box for most participants and in the top three for all participants. The seventh ranked as the worst box for every participant I interviewed. People hated box number seven for a multitude of reasons. First, although one person liked the ‘zebra like’ staining of the wood she noted that it was definitely not suitable for a wedding. Participants also didn’t like the size or the premise of the chalkboard on the front of the box. It was one of the last boxes where we viewed the Amazon listing page so many people also knew people complained about the poor quality of it’s construction.
People had similar concerns about the plastic see-through top of boxes one and four. Most participants also didn’t like the idea of their guests being able to look into a see-through top. The pictures the company chose also made the plastic boxes look like it was bowing inwards, not affixed appropriately to the top of the box.
I noted above that people generally didn’t like the white washed look of boxes five and six and that people hated the font I’d had my supplier put on boxes three and six but the font on five didn’t test much better.
When asked to create ‘one box to rule them all’ at the end of the interview everyone chose the font from box two. Most participants would add a lock and those that didn’t liked the latchlessness of box 2. People were split between making the box brown or making it white. The people who made it white wanted it to be completely white, though the majority liked the grain showing. There wasn’t any consistency in what shade of brown people wanted the box to be between two, three, and four. Everyone did love the idea of the wide slot from box two and as previously stated, the top of the box being wood and not see through.
Once I compiled the results I brought my recommended changes to John with a few alternatives. The obvious changes were:
The less obvious potential changes and question were:
John concurred with my analysis and results. Honestly, I felt so stupid for not realizing a number of people wanted the box to be painted white, though it didn’t seem like most of my competition realized it either. It was one of those things though, that as soon as it crossed both John and my minds, it made sense.
The lock and key made sense too but neither John nor I thought that it was as easy to identify the need without conducting the interviews. I’d found one wooden card box that had a lock though it was far more padlock-like and serious looking than what I thought was appropriate for a wedding. It was a delicate balance. When people initially said they wanted the box to be locked I wondered if there was a way to design the box so it had a lock but it wasn’t visible. This idea was attractive to some participants, but a couple of people wanted the lock to be visible to the people in the wedding party. They didn’t want it to be a big, ugly, bulky padlock but they wanted it visible to act as a deterrent to potential thieves. I wasn’t going to satisfy everyone, but if I figured out the right way to lock the box I felt like it could be the difference between success and failure.
We didn’t have much of a conversation about making the slot wider and putting in the top center of the box. It seemed like a logical, easy fix. It was the same with the size and font of the text. The results were unanimous and the testing saved me from potential disaster of the ugliest font imaginable on a box.
John nixed the idea of having people assemble the boxes themselves. Quality was going to be a big issue and shipping the box in pieces left the potential for the separate parts to get warped, cracked, and damaged. Even though it would be far more expensive to ship the constructed box with it’s larger dimensional weight, it was worth the cost, especially since quality issues were an issue with my major competitor and a way I could differentiate my product.
The big question was what color I would make the box. John noted that both brown and white seemed like good choices, agreeing with the participant who said that white with black lettering would appeal to a broader audience but white with gold lettering could be perfect for people with gold in their color palette.
I needed more information, so I contacted my supplier. First, I asked if they could add a lock to the box. They said that they could and sent me back a list of options. One type of lock stood out to me. It was a small heart and there were three different variations listed, gold, silver and a brushed bronze/black lock. The gold looked really good and the silver looked nice too but the brushed bronze lock didn’t go with the wedding vibe I was looking for. The latch looked a bit too much like a medieval chest latch too, but maybe it would look better in person.
I confirmed that they could make the card slot bigger and put it in the center, then I asked whether they could paint the ‘Cards’ text with less translucence on a new version of the brown box.
I’d taken some time to examine the sample boxes they had sent me. The black text on the whitewashed box looked good but the brown paint beneath the white ‘Cards’ text on the brown box showed through. It just needed a couple of more layers of paint to make the text solid, but that was exactly the QA cutting corners problem I was trying to avoid, especially since I had a good alternative. I was going with the white box with a gold lock and key and gold lettering. The white box with silver everything might be a different variation at some point but the silver ‘Cards’ would blend in too much with the rest of the white box. The white box with black ‘Cards’ written on it wouldn’t work right now because my supplier didn’t have an easy way to get a black heart lock. The silver lock might’ve looked okay, but I was hoping for everything to match, especially for this first launch.
I didn’t want to fork over the money to start mass producing boxes until I was sure every aspect was to my liking so I asked for two more samples, one with the thinnest cut of pine my manufacturer would use and one they recommended. I needed to minimize cost, especially with the amount shipping the completed boxes and the amount I needed to spend on advertising but I didn’t want to compromise quality for the sake of saving a few dollars per box.
John convinced me to ha
