How This Company Thrived by Ditching Most of Its Customers

Travis Merrigan and Nancie Weston had a simple, stylish idea. They desired to make a container that clears standard water. Fill it up from a suspicious source -- a flat stream or a corroded faucet abroad -- and then use it like a France media, forcing down on a plunger-like narrow to screen out dangerous substances. In 2013, after two decades of growth and an excellent $15,000 Indiegogo technique, they got. It was known as the Water Purification Cup, marketed under the brand name Grayl.

Their product sales technique was ambitious; they desired Grayl to be useful to everyone. They provided it a smooth, stainless-steel style to transmitted its strength and high-end beauty. Then they provided three cleaning refills, which were known as Tap, Pathway and Journey. Tap created standard water flavor better, and the other two got safe. Tap and Pathway were filtration that eliminated dangerous bacteria and protozoa, while Journey was a cleaner that also eliminated out malware. The container cost $80 and involved the Journey filter; the other two refills were marketed independently.










Confused? So was, well, everyone.
At business exhibitions, even Merrigan fought to explain his item to clients. “I’d spend two and a half minutes just describing Tap, Pathway, Journey,” he says. “Odds are you still don’t comprehend, and I haven’t gone over with you what places us apart.” Two decades in, Grayl had handled to area 104 retail store associates, many of them health and fitness stores and gift stores. A few outside manufacturers like REI were moving stock, but the reviews was poor. Suppliers reported that the general product packaging was missing a tale, clients reported that the container was overweight for outdoor camping and the three-cartridge system was still complicated. As one item specialist put it in an email to Merrigan,“Why would you buy the second-best cartridge?”

Merrigan forced back. You just don’t get it, he’d tell retailers and clients. But as product sales bogged down, he reevaluated. “That was the wrong reaction,” he says now. “The toughest thing is to listen to hard facts. It took some humbleness.”

If the organization desired to develop, its creators noticed, it was going to have to start from the begining. So the group started with a question: Whom is the item for? “We just didn’t comprehend who our primary customers were,” Merrigan says. “We thought, Everybody beverages standard water, and everybody wants it to be clean, therefore, we can sell to everybody.” In 2016, a new Kickstarter technique presented new designed for outside outdoorsmen and urgent preppers. Instead of metal, it appeared of light and portable BPA-free nasty, and instead of three refills, it came only with Grayl’s top cleaner. The changes enhanced edges so much that the organization decreased the list price to $59.50.

Still, the creators were on advantage. “We needed that Kickstarter way to work, or we may not have been an organization any longer,” Merrigan says. Within its first day, the new container surpassed its $25,000 crowdfunding objective. By the time the procedure came to a close, Grayl had brought up nearly a quarter-­million dollars -- more than 14 times what it’d gained through its first crowdfunding attempt.

The organization finished its connection with some of its retail store associates and converted its attention to its new concentrate on audience. With this laser device concentrate, it soon tripled its achieve. Today Grayl comes in more than 350 traditional, such as REI, Canada’s MEC and Australia’s Hill Design. Last year saw triple-­digit product sales growth, which Grayl desires to duplicate in 2017. “We head into stores now and clients high-five us,” Merrigan says. “We’re not the most important water-filtration organization in the business, but our opponents are very fascinated in what we’re doing. And they should be. We’re coming for them.”