Closing down

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.