How To Get 900,000 Members Into a Kid’s Club In LessThan One Year

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Joe McVoy

This is a story about how I got 900,000 members into a kid’s club in less than one year and how the club

took our business from $1 Million in sales to $3 Million seemingly overnight.

Back in the 1980s I owned a company that printed and sold stickers for kids – if you are old enough toremember, a display of them in a Hallmark store or gift shop looked like this:

We had thousands of designs and in fact, this entire display was our product and we were in around10,000 gift and stationery stores throughout the US And Canada.

Not every store had this much product, some only had small counter displays.

Back then there were about 200 companies in the sticker business since anyone who had printingcapability could print on pressure sensitive material and make stickers.

Ours were different – they were screen printed on holographic or prismatic vinyl and then die cut. We hadonly one competitor who did it that way since the cost of making the stickers was 10 times as much as thealternative.

However, the kids liked our kind better – and that made all the difference.

We did have one problem. Our 4 biggest competitors all had sticker clubs for the kids and each had 30,000– 40,000 kids in their club.

It seemed to me that we should have one too, but the retail stores absolutely hated them.

Here’s why.

The retailers looked at these clubs as a way for the companies to sell direct to the kids through the club,bypassing the retail stores.

Naturally the stores were very upset about this.

So, we came up with a totally different way to do a club that would be beneficial for the store so they wouldlove us and buy more of our stickers than those other companies.

The idea was quite simple, really.

I set up our club so it would be run under the store’s name along with ours. We had window poster,membership cards and even a “limited Edition Sticker-of-the Month”.

Here’s what the program looked like.

We provided the window poster and the monthly display free and the stores bought the stickers for 5 centseach and gave one to each member for free.

Typically the store would charge the kids $2.00 for an annual sticker club membership.

The store’s cost was 12 stickers/year at 5 cents = 60 cents. The kids paid $2.00/year so the club wasactually a profit center for the stores.

But that was irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. The stores loved our club and promoted it. Thetypical store had 1,000 members coming in for their free sticker each month and that caused . . .

major traffic jams at the store

Most stores ended up setting up the days you could get your free sticker alphabetically by last name.

So, what do you think happens when mom and the kids are one of 50 people that day coming in for theirsticker and they have to wait?

Right, they buy stuff!

Greeting cards, wrapping paper, any of the thousands of other things in a Hallmark store or gift shop.

By year end we had 900,000 kids in the club all coming in each month for their free stickers.

The typical store got a 15 – 20% boost in ANNUAL sales due to this promotion.

The stores loved us!

Who wouldn’t love a promotion they got for free that brought so many people into their store they did anextra $150,000 – $200,000 in sales!

We had around 900 sticker club outlets and had to print 900,000 limited edition stickers every month.

Total revenue boost to our club outlets was around $135,000,000.

We had to allocate store locations – only 2 per mall. We also started requiring club outlets to carry a largeselection of product like in the photo at the top of this post.

We had done $1 Million in sales the year before the club and the year of the club our sales jumped to $3Million.

Not bad for a free promotion where everyone benefited.

So, I know you might not have a product you sell to stores, but the lesson here is to understand theconcept:

“we had 200 competitors and 4 large ones with sticker clubs”

“those 4 companies were far ahead of us in product selection and sales”

“those same 4 companies were aggravating their retail customers by appearing tosell around them”

“all it took was to come up with a way to get the stores on our side and we took over

the market”

How can you use a similar concept in your business?

Share this post and help spread the love!

Joe McVoy

Thank you for reading my posts!

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