An Odd Way to Begin
A ship wrecked in the waters near
Hundreds of years later, I walked into a shop. Some old bronze coins, corrupted by salt and time, were for sale from that wreck. On a whim, I picked up a couple. They were inscribed in the old language,
I reasoned it was time to learn more about the history of Viet Nam, so I bought a couple of books on the subject. They were more of a dry and dense list of facts than a summary, but I struggled through it, and started to piece together the narrative. I was surprised: what a story! It's like Game of Thrones on hard mode!
Sadly most people I meet in Viet Nam don't at all see it that way, it's seen as a very boring subject overall. What a shame!
An Awful Product
Fast forward a few months, I'm wandering downtown HCMC, and walk into a shop. There's a pile of souvenirs being sold at tourists, and a glint of metal catches my eye. Coins? Well... not quite.
Something Amiss, or Out of Place
Most people may note immediately, that the pennies are not, in fact, nickels. The arcade tokens are out of place certainly. Looking carefully, the US pennies are fake bearing fine marks that the real minting process would not leave. I'm also fairly certain that the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam did not mint US currency in 1976 (or in fact at any other time).
But what of the older Vietnamese coins? Believe it or not, those are actually even worse.
First, the coins are fake. They are modern, stamped-brass "feng shui" coins, for good luck and making charms. Usually, these coins have the same text as coins issued by emperors considered prosperous, or who have names that rhyme with wealth. Some can have markings from imaginary eras -- e.g. 'jade dragon eternal kingdom' or whatever, and are used as charms or souvenirs from holy sites. Some forms of the latter have been made for hundreds of years and can be quite interesting! I digress though -- these are not interesting fakes.
Next, the names on the coins are not the names of Vietnamese emperors. They are the names of Chinese emperors. Second, the calligraphy is careless. Third, these are stamped brass, and the real coins would have been cast. I could go on, but I think that's enough!
A Pretty Low Bar
The other products in the pile were similar. None of them were particularly cheap, either! It's rare that I see a product so bad, that I feel insulted just looking at it. I very much appreciate Chinese culture and history, but listing Chinese emperors as the leaders of Vietnam? That's a pretty bad faux-pas.
Normally, I would buy one to get better photographs at home, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. A few days later, I was still annoyed, and started toying with the idea of doing something better myself.
I tried to imagine the opposite of that product (vibrant - authentic - descriptive), sketched out a logo, and paid someone to finish it for me:
It has a Name and Logo -- Now What?
Alright, a name and a logo. What exactly is the product though? It should have coins in it, a short history lesson, look good, and be easy to buy as a souvenir and throw in your luggage without worrying that it gets damaged.
I settled on a brochure design. If I used good quality printing services, and good card stock, I knew this would look pretty good. Neither of those things come cheaply, but that's life. How to mount the coin though? I couldn't just glue it there, or shove the whole thing in a plastic bag, like my competitors.
OK, it's an Idea Now
So I had a brand, a logo, and a rough idea for a product. That makes it officially an "idea". Sadly, ideas are a commodity -- everyone thinks they are the valuable part of a business, but actually they are pretty worthless. More or less everyone has pretty good ideas, but limited resources (time,money) to execute those ideas. So they don't get as far as bringing something to market.
I have had dozens of ideas for brands, and even fully built several of them -- however the product-market fit was not right, or too many problems were identified in early attempts at sales. Mostly, I just disagreed with the target markets about how cool the product was.
I've got a graveyard of half-baked ideas that failed at this stage, that greets me every morning.
Overall Design Problems
I settled on a 6-page brochure. This leaves the recto page for some sort of attractive design. Inside: two pages for copy, two pages for the coin. Finally a page for branding on the verso. Any print designer will immediately shout at me for this (heresy! anathema! unclean!) -- no one makes 6 page brochures! That's not how folding paper works! They are right, of course -- but you'll see.
Scaling Problems
The product has one unenviable challenge: I have to scale up sourcing antique coins between 200 and 2000 years old. These all have to sourced, authenticated, graded, cleaned, and pass a final QC check. They are also written in an ancient language that less than 100 people can read worldwide. Also the resources for that language are in Vietnamese which is approximately my seventh language or whatever.
Nice. This sounds like a proper challenge.
Manufacturing Problems
Finally, the design had to be easy to assemble. Especially because I spent so much on print and genuine antiques. So it had to have the minimum number of steps, require readily available materials, and no machinery. In short, I'd have to do it myself by hand. Which, as it turns out, is extraordinarily time-consuming.
But hey, the point was to make something I care about.
Content Problems
The brand needs a website and domain name. At least this one is easy for me. I bought the .vn domain, and built a small site. Then expanded it. Added a blog. Standard stuff I've been doing for a long time.
It also needs a whole bunch of historical research -- although for this at least, I had already bought and read a few books on the topic.
Production
After some months, I had solved these problems reliably. I won't go too far into the details, because the sum of those solutions form the difficult-to-copy part of my brand. I will note that out of approximately 1200 coins unearthed... just one is nice enough to find its way into my product.
Once I had it all worked out, I hired a designer to lay out the design I mocked up (it's amazing what you can do with paper, tape, and time). Then I rang the best printer I knew and pulled the (expensive) trigger.
Two weeks passed.
What Next?
So I have a brand, and a finished product, and have painstakingly made enough to sell. Nice, that's nearly 10% of the work finished! Now for sales, most of the other 90%.
I hate doing sales. It's a weak point of mine. One of the major reasons I decided to launch this product is that I knew I needed sales experience. So, I went and hustled and got some sales-on-consignment contracts out. It's for sale in stores now!
However, it looks a bit weird sitting there on its own, it's hard for the customer to understand. It needs to exist in the context of other products -- more Vietnamese emperors, more stories! So I designed and wrote 3 more, scaled my coin acquisition process to pretty alarming quantities, and have ideas for even more types of products.
Designing products is contagious.
