I’m not Sir Dyson but…

I’m not Sir Dyson but…

Lots of great businesses started from a great invention. Very often, it was purely someone trying to find a solution to a problem they faced in their lives, at their workplace or at home. One of the best examples is Sir James Dyson, although you probably know his products better than you know him as a person. 

After looking at many cases of inventors-turned-businessmen I have noticed that they have one thing in common. They did not simply just spot the problem and try to solve it. They also didn’t just invent something for sake of staying busy and keeping themselves occupied. The key was the combination of the right solution or product + the right timing + an entrepreneurial mind to commercialise their inventions. When listening to your customers and answering their questions and enquiries, you always need to be on guard. You just never know when someone will ask for something nobody is doing, and you could be the first to bring it to the market. 

Let me give you an example of how it works with me. A while ago I had a conversation with a local estate agency owner, a very successful businesswoman. We were not discussing my business at all and I wasn’t pitching for it. But out of nowhere the estate agent mentioned that the cabinets they were using to store their tenants’ keys were rubbish, the keys were falling of the hooks, the capacity was all wrong, etc. Before she finished her first sentence, I started drawing a simple design of the new product in my head: a key cabinet, including fixes to all the issues experienced by the end user – the very same estate agent. Before our meeting was over I also managed to check the prices of available products on the market and a day later, my project landed on the desk of the design department. We are now in the final stages of preparing the sample and then will introduce the new product in our range. Just like that!

We have quite a few products like these ourselves. We offer a range of accessories, re-designed letterboxes, or entirely new products based solely on market demand and e-mails and phone calls from our potential clients. It is what helps us to make our business more innovative and fresher than our competition, and keep in the front of the race to win new business.

Our products are simple. They are nowhere as advanced as iPhones, or hoovers from Sir Dyson. But they probably were born the same way – from the idea, through designers’ boards and countless planning meetings with our manufacturer to be delivered to the market as a “new thing” nobody else is doing or maybe something everybody is doing already but much better and perhaps with a more attractive price tag. We could simply order a container of stuff that looks the same as our competitors’ products and fill many pages of our website with post boxes for sale. Instead, we insist on our own designs and the best point of sale there is – the quality. We offer fewer products but with a guarantee that we have looked at every detail of the design and perfected it as much as we could. But we are also constantly ready to act if you, our customer, say that something could be done differently or certain aspects of our business could be done better.

So while you are buying our letterboxes, please be kind enough to send us an e-mail with your honest feedback. That way, we can continue to be inventive, lean and always forward-thinking.

As Elon Musk said:

“I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

Dominic- Owner & Director of Letterbox4you,supplier of quality post boxes.