How Do We Come Up With Our Products?

Hey guys, Nate Powell here from Ferocious Beard Company.  Some people have wondered how it is that we come up with our products for sale on FerociousBeard.com.  Well, I thought I'd try to answer that today with this blog post.  And one thing I'll preface this post with is that for us, our web site is a living, breathing environment.  It's going to be constantly in a state of flux as we add new products that we think and hope will be successful and take away products that, for whatever reason, just weren't of interest to customers.

So, we started our Ferocious Beard Company in October 2017.  We brainstormed and came up with a variety of beard oils that we liked, were fun to make, and  thought others might like.  We came up with different ideas for how best to sell these.  First we started with free samples (just one bottle please) with paid shipping which I think made some people feel as if we were being dishonest for restricting the amount of free beard oil they could order even though it cost us to ship the products.  Then we tried free samples (again, one bottle only please) with free shipping - which led to lots of free orders, but not many paid orders, then finally (for now) we've decided to go with as many paid sample beard oils as the customer wants (at $5.99 each) with a one-time shipping rate of $3.99 to cover all this.  This model is fair to both Ferocious Beard Company (as we can continue to offer 1/3 oz beard oil sample bottles that will last for at least a week and a half with normal usage AND allows for our customers to buy as many samples as they desire for one low shipping rate.  It's a WIN WIN for just about everybody.

So, as an example of how a new product gets on the shelf here, here's what just happened yesterday.  We made a posting about a particular beard balm we were selling on our Facebook page.  A commentator mentioned he didn't care for the particular scent of one of the essential oils we used in that balm.  I responded that one of the benefits of FerociousBeard.com was that we had a cool section set up on our site where people could order customized beard oils.  Almost as an afterthought, I mentioned that maybe in the future we would also offer this option for our beard balms.  He asked why we didn't do this already which, to his credit, was a very fair question.  I started thinking about it and realized that we could very easily roll this service out.  Now, anybody that knows how we operate around here (look at our Ferocious Labs page for details) knows that we...

1.  Identify new product and innovation opportunities through customer feedback and brainstorming  CHECK!
2. Rapidly prototype and test products with customers to quickly identify projects worth pursuing. (Updated: CHECK!) Our beta is available now to order custom beard balm: https://ferociousbeard.com/products/create-your-own-beard-balm
3. Finally, identify products with high potential for customer satisfaction and rapidly bring them to production 

So, just like that, we've completed step 1.  In fact, as I'm typing this, we've also received validation of this idea by another commentator on our Facebook group who agrees that this would be a great idea.  So, soon we'll be on Step 2 (where we'll prototype/test the idea out on the site) and if successful, we'll go right to Step 3 and roll it out permanently.

That's an example of how a product is born here at FerociousBeard.com.  We listen to our customers intently, we think critically about if something is worthwhile to pursue, and if it is, we give it 110% to make it happen.

Thanks for reading!  Be Ferocious!

--Nate/FBC