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2 min read
It was never meant to be anything more than a bit of fun.
Three years ago, Australian entrepreneur and then-HR manager Lori Phegan just wanted to blow off some steam from her day job by leveraging material she’d gathered from 20 years in human resources and turning her workplace frustrations into pithy, tongue-in-cheek slogans.
She put them on mugs, pens and notebooks as ‘inappropriate gifts’ and sold them on a basic Wix website she’d set up herself, alongside social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
But it was only meant to be a creative outlet – a way to have a laugh, vent and share inappropriate humour with other mothers – until one of her products went viral.
A mug with the words ‘I’m not feeling very talky today. Off you f*ck” took the internet by storm, racking up nearly 10 million views virtually overnight.
Demand for her products shot through the roof – and it was more than she, or the website, could handle.
“What used to happen was I'd have two or three orders maybe a day. I'd pack them, go down to the post office, write a little note to my customers,” she told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Sarah O’Carroll on the New Investor series.
“And then my website started getting two hundred orders in per day, for a week, and I had to turn the website off.”
Juggling motherhood, a corporate job and what was just meant to be a small-scale online business, the viral mug brought everything to a standstill.
With such a stunning reception, it was all the confirmation she needed to take the hobby all the way.
“I thought to myself: this has actually got legs. This business has got legs, so let's close that website, let's do this properly, and structure ourselves so that we can actually fulfill those orders.”
The company is now a far cry from its humble roots as a little online outfit. The Inappropriate Gift Co now has operations in Australia as well as the UK, and is on track to meet its targets to turn over three million this year.
And it all started with a mug.
See the original story and video interview by clicking here
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3 min read
3 min read
Gifts we are not allowed to advertise on Facebook
No need to read any further if you get offended easily!
Once upon a time before people got offended by everything, there lived a successful inappropriate gift shop. The gift shop was a safe and fun store where people with an inappropriate sense of humour could find gifts for their friends and loved ones who also had a rude, edgy, sarcastic and quirky sense of humour.
Many of our customers found us through our Facebook page. Then came along the big bad wolf Zuckerburg (misspelt on purpose IYKYK) and his community standards and they threatened to blow the store down. The Inappropriate Gift Co pleaded with them... "Please this is our livelihood, we left corporate jobs with good money to sell this funny shit, please don't ban us and take away our fun and our ability to pay our mortgage"
The Facebook gods looked down upon us with pity and said:
"Alrighty then as long as you only post gifts and memes that meet our standards and we will not be showing your page or your shop to anyone new"
The Gift Co was relieved that it could still exist until it realised that a good 90% of its gifts and memes may not meet community standards...and by not being shown to any new inappropriate peeps it is difficult to grow, especially when we cannot advertise our best sellers.
If you have read this far... THANK YOU. Here are our best sellers that we are not allowed to advertise:
1 min read