A sticker was not just a sticker once somebody had to pick it, pack it, and put it in the mail.
Apply was still a side company, but the financial model was getting real. The deck was bright yellow and tried to answer a basic question: could we make smart, bold decisions before we spent a bunch of money making the wrong things?
The first problem was fulfillment. Picking, packing, and shipping an order could cost roughly two to five dollars before adding design, printing, or distribution. That put a high floor under the price of anything we sold.
The slide said it plainly: “pack up & price up.”
Selling one cheap sticker at a time was not going to work. We needed enough quality and quantity in an order to make the shipping economics reasonable. A collection, pack, or larger hero sticker made more sense than treating every little design as its own transaction.
Printing had the opposite shape. The estimate for 1,000 stickers was about thirty-six cents each, and the model assumed some collection stickers could eventually get closer to twelve cents. Those were useful numbers, but they were not the whole business. Cheap printing did not help much if every order carried several dollars of handling around it.
The model also made offline retail look surprisingly important. A pop-up could avoid some fulfillment cost, put the product directly in front of people, and double as marketing. It might even become profitable earlier than the online store.
None of that was proven. The deck assumed an ecommerce conversion rate, items per order, foot traffic, printing costs, and fulfillment costs. Every one of those assumptions needed testing.
COVID added a new list. I had moved temporarily to Poughkeepsie as things escalated in New York. The model now needed cases for cheaper rent, slower sales, lower conversion, and cheaper advertising. Some costs might fall while the path to customers became much less clear.
The next-step slide started with “Product, product, product!” Even the difference between a three-inch sticker and a five-inch sticker could change the economics and the decisions.
That was the work. Make the product, test the price, and find out whether the bright yellow model of Apply had anything to do with the real one.