One of our test bed retail projects is LightersWorld.com where we sell Colibri Lighters and Porsche Design lighters. Colibri recently bankrupt actually shut down for 6 months. The new owner contacted us about selling for them again since we pretty much owned the Colibri lighter market even though it just a site we used for testing ideas. Some of things we did to were pretty elementary to sell 6 figures of lighters every year. Now post crisis and post Colibri and other lighter brands like Porches Design have contracted dramatically. What do you do when your market contracts 70-80% but there are just as many people selling the product? Products don’t sell themselves anymore. As we plan and experiment with lighters world you can expect to find several high profile promotions.

Free gifts and promotions help but people are feeling the pinch and not spending. Quite frankly I don’t blame them. In our situation we believe customer service is main attraction right now. We contacted people from last year and asked anyone who had questions to contact us about any problems with their warranty. After Colibri shut its doors on January of this year all the replacement product we ordered never showed up for some customers. Using our Voodoo ecommerce best practices we automated emails and phone calls to customers asking them to contact-us. Low and behold we received several emails from people who feel through the cracks and the sound of their voice was interesting that someone actually cared enough to do the right thing. It is a lot of trouble but by making sure that they were taking care of they are more likely to tell people about us. In addition to offering them a replacement lighter we extended their new warranty for 12 months. Reviving a dead business in a dead market can be fun. More to come on lighters world.