YouGoatMe

Since the first release, I got 120 sales of the toy and 5 t-shirt sale – while I have initially ordered 3,000 units.

The whole inventory had a volume of 16 Cubic meters and weighted almost 1.5 tons... that's a lot of goats...

Even though I published many videos, pictures on social media and ads on Facebook, the sales didn't go up as the virality was very hard to attain.

The fulfillment center was initially offering the warehouse free of charge for the two first months but started to charge a +$500 per month for storage (increasing every month).

There were two options to do:

• Change fulfillment center or store the items temporarily in a cheaper place while finding a way to sell the inventory. That would involve doubling down in terms of cost for paying the warehousing fees and transport.
• Giving up the inventory, as it started to cost more than the value of the stock itself. And recognizing the mistake of not assessing properly the market.

That was hard to pull the plug after putting all the efforts to be at this level. But it would have been very risky to involve more cost for a project that was already losing a lot of money.

One big learning is to evaluate the demand or at least make pre-orders for such hardware project, before committing big quantities. That would have been an amazing learning experience to be able to execute on an idea in the hardware ecosystem (without having any experience on the field).

I decided to move on with Gabi, but be open on other initiatives to have positive social impact and provide better education for younger generations.

During the launch I have sent 65 Gabies to different journalists and influencers who covers subjects like social impact, women empowerment, goats, viral funny videos.

I have got only one answer from Devin Thorpe who was hosting a podcast about social impact business.

There's the whole storytelling around Gabi the Goat to build in a website. I used Shopify with a theme built from scratch to tell the story of Gabi and advertise the toy and the t-shirts.

https://www.yougoatme.com/

I have decided to outsource the fulfillment to SendFromChina (https://www.sendfromchina.com/) Since they had competitive prices and an integration with Shopify.

As soon as the store was live and advertised on personal social media, I got 25 orders!

Getting as sample is just the beginning of the long journey to mass-produce an item. There were different things to take care such as:

• Packaging
• Goodies (stickers, postal cards, booklet)
• Registering a barcode with GS1
• Negotiating the quantity and unit price
• Find a warehouse and fulfillment center

Guided Imports helped on negotiating with the factory and communicating with them. I ordered 3200 packaged units (200 will be for promotion, influencers, journalists) and 200 unpackaged units for a project (burning man themed camp around goats).

I had a way to raise money with Gabi the Goat so now all I needed was a way to use the money to help the girls get the education they deserve.

My background is around tech and marketing, but not much on the operational side. I wanted to operate as a fund raiser for an existing non-profit that would wisely the money to provider better education.

This is where Education For All Morocco (https://www.efamorocco.org/) comes in. EFA Morocco is a non-profit that builds and runs boarding houses for girls who want to continue their education.

The boarding houses allow the girls to live closer to school and everything is provided to them for free so money is no longer an issue.

I went to Atlas mountain chain to visit the boarding school that were operated by this non-profit and it stroke me to see the sparkles and motivation of these girls to learn and fulfill their dreams of succeeding!

Having an assigned account manager with Guided Imports way key. When I send them the full specs about the toy and the 3D design, they prospect factories on their network and give you a list of 5 quotes from different factories.

Based on their certifications, history, unit/mold price, I had to pick one and pay for the initial fees to order a sample.

After an email exchange that lasted almost 6 months, I finally received the first sample 🐐

The feeling is so rewarding to be able to touch a physical good that was just an idea a year ago!

Realizing that it was possible to manufacture such toy, I had to find out what it would look like and what I wanted to get from this project.

First, I published a contest on 99design to get a 3D model, and sent all the specifications to Guided Import to get a list of 5 quotes from different factories in China.

Manufacturing another toy out there just to create a viral phenomenon didn't really excited me as much, but wanted to have a positive impact with it.

I was born and raised in Morocco before moving to the US and I feel very privileged to be able to attend to a great school which allowed me to get where I am. I knew I wanted to be involved in education as it's a social lift. In some rural areas, girls aren’t able to attend school after the age of 12. This is due to a lack of money or the long, unsafe journeys to schools that are too far away.

So instead of these girls following their dreams of a better future they end up with a life spent at home. A life of domestic chores, early marriage and having children.

So I set out to create a squawking rubber toy that represents this legendary animal. One that I could sell to raise money and help these girls get a better education. Each purchase of Gabi the Goat gives a girl in Morocco 3 days of education and housing.

That’s when YouGoatMe and Gabi the Goat was born.

While I went full nomad in South-East Asia, I added a stop in Shenzhen (China) to get inspired and see the manufacturing world over there. It took me few clicks to find few factories on Alibaba who manufactured the squeaky chicken and few exchanged messages to be able to visit their factory.
One of the challenges was the language barrier – I came across Guided Imports (https://www.guidedimports.com/) who can assist you through the whole process (finding factory, getting a sample, negotiation, mass production, QA, shipping). That was the moment when I decided to move forward with this.

I came across a YouTube from Big Marvel playing with a screaming chicken toy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9LQfYQwkxQ
And I was impressed that it was viewed +50M times (time of writing it's 84M). He succeeded to drive that much attention with just a silly funny toy!

That made think that the goat is actually much funnier animal (long tongue and rectangular creepy eyes), and there wasn't any character or squeaky goat toy on the market!