I helped to launch a service called KnickerMail in December 2010, it was a service that let people send designer lingerie as a greeting card. Our ambitious objective to “see what happens”. Kriss Soonik had started to get an increasing amount of orders where the person making the order and the recipient were two different people, so she wanted to see whether sending lingerie would work as a standalone service. I had recently quit his day job and wanted to explore different startup projects, so I created the site based on a Shopify template. It was a very lean operation, costing just a couple of hundred dollars and a couple of evenings worth of work, as documented by ArcticStartup.

We managed to get a good amount of press (UrbanSpoon NYC, Glamour, etc.) as a result of active blogger outreach and this quickly trickled into sales. It turned out that people, mostly Americans, were happy to shell out more than $60 for a pair of knickers in the mail. We passed our first $1000 in revenue fairly quickly and it seemed we had created a profitable niche operation.

Today, about 20 months later we’ve found out that this was only partially true. The nature of the business doesn’t accommodate much repeat business and virality, so in order to sell we needed to create a steady stream of new traffic. PR proved much more difficult at times other than Valentine’s Day, no matter whether we did it ourselves or hired a freelancer, though we had some success. Inbound marketing generated some traffic from guest posts and SEO but the sales this generated wasn’t substantial. And paid channel trials didn’t convert into sales profitably. All in all KnickerMail proved to be an extremely niche business that generated some sales seasonally but that demanded some money (Shopify fees, marketing) and attention (the most pricey resource of all) all year round.

We had a couple of ideas how to grow out of our tiny niche, for example add designers or add products beyond just lingerie, but neither of us felt this was our battle. We had learned great lessons in ecommerce and customer service, and we’re glad to have given this a profitable shot. Nevertheless we’ve decided to go for a solution that Schumpeter would be happy with. We’re doing a little “creative destruction” and will shut down KnickerMail as it exists today. This will free up time for other, bigger ideas.

If this made you feel like sending a lingerie greeting card to someone, do it before Sunday 29th.

Lessons learned:

If you have an idea, put it out there with lean startup methodology. Shopify is awesome for all things related to selling stuff online.

When doing PR outreach, start as far upstream as possible. My first pitch (via someone “neutral” tipping them off) was to SpringWise which is read by cool curators all around the world, and this got us on the radar or UrbanSpoon NYC, which got us more coverage in turn.

It’s relatively easy to start ranking for long-tail keywords. We got many first page position for phrases like romantic long distance relationship gifts by just putting out a post, without any link building.

The most important thing is team. Although this project turned out be a loss-maker (when I factor in time I could have spent on other projects) I’m very glad I participated, because working with someone as creative, no-BS, fun and ambitious as Kriss is a benefit in itself. Not our last project together, I’m sure (No pressure, Kriss )

Niche is good, but watch out for niches that are simply too small. Not enough money to be made, but perhaps more importantly risk of losing motivation.

Know when to stop. Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” concept can be a bit painful to execute, but it’s the only way to get to bigger projects and successes.