Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Given what has been happening in the last few days, the title might lead you to believe I am writing about Lehman Brothers or AIG. But I am not. Today I will tell you about an idea I had many years ago for Officenet that I always loved and failed miserably.

At least until last week.

Back in 1999 we launched the old “new site of Officenet”. And it included my idea, which was called “Caida Libre” (”Free Fall”). It was a section of the site where we offered a limited amount of products that started at full price, but then every midnight the price fell by 20%. So if full price was $100, tomorrow the price was $80, the day after $60 (if there were units left), and so on. On the fifth day, things were sold 80% off. Since we added a new lot of product every day, we always had one at each phase of the discount chain.

This is a variant of the dutch auction, where instead of having increasing bids, the price starts high and goes down until someone pays it.

I thought it was a great idea. I imagined people speculating: “Do I buy today or wait until 12AM so it goes some more risking to run out?” and lots of orders coming in at 12:00:01AM every night. Here you can see a year 2000 screen of Caída Libre. And you may think: “Why do you say it failed if things were sold?”. The answer is no one bought anything so we normally ended up buying ourselves so it would not look so ugly.

To please me, we kept it online for several years. And it was always the same: despite the huge discounts, no one visited it or bought anything.

But a few days ago, I got a great piece of news! Things have changed now that we have a store!

Because of an excess of inventory, last week we made a promotion of chairs with a spirit that is a lot like  Caída Libre. We launched some flyers last Monday. Offered some 9 different chair models, all with different quantities (some we had 5, others 3, others just one). All at the same price (about U$S 65). And we lowered it by U$S 6 every two days. Every time a chair is sold, we reduce the available amount. And every day the price goes down we reduce it.

It was a total success!!! People bought everything! Now we are planning to repeat it with Office Supplies.

Ah! The sweet feeling of revenge…

I invite those who are willing to share their great failed ideas, with or without sweet revenge.

Photo: Rick Neves