Intro
The world has been improving its conditions, but not its products.
The world has been improving its conditions, but not its products.
We believe that’s a shame. We think it’s a shame when you look at your life and see how much better your life is, but you’re not using it. You don’t need to use it because you have everything you need already and have no reason to change.
That might be true for the people who are happy with the way things are now, but we don’t think that for everyone. We think that for most of us, there are some things we can do to make our lives better so that we can enjoy them more fully and so that we can create what we want in life more often and so that our lives will be full of possibilities rather than mere limitations.
Producing a product which meets those needs is what dolled out shampoo is all about: creating something which makes people’s lives better while they are using it in an everyday way. It isn’t magic or miracle product (although there are some unique ingredients), it isn’t the next big thing (although there are some innovative new technologies). It isn’t a fancy new tech (although there is some cool stuff inside). It isn’t the next star-making app (although there is a lot of great stuff going on). It isn’t Kickstarter or Indiegogo or Crowdfunding (although there certainly have been some cool ideas).
What Makes Dolled Up Shampoo Unique?
My first experience with shampoo was some time ago. At a particularly intimate family dinner, I had asked my father to bring me some before he left for work. I found a bottle of expensive shampoo in the cupboard and started pouring it into my hair. It smelled nice, but after about 20 minutes of using it my scalp felt dry. I tried to rinse off with cold water and the shampoo left behind a film that was too hard to wash away with the extra-warm water. It was an unfortunate experience, but I concluded that shampoo wasn’t for me, so I didn’t bother to buy any more. That was long ago though; now, almost half a decade later, I thought it might be fun to revisit that bottle of expensive shampoo and see if it has changed at all since then.
I don’t think anybody would use this exact brand of shampoo now — not even me — but what makes it unique is how they are doing it: they are adding liquid to the bar of soap called “dolled up shampoo” rather than using traditional soap (which is much cheaper). That kind of innovation has been around for a long time: in ancient China, people used bamboo and flax to make their own soap (the Chinese word for “soap” is guo), which was then sold under different brand names (for example, “shampoo” as well as “creamy soup/congealed milk soup”).
Other brands have come along since then too: in the 1960s, Lever Brothers started selling soap made from ground-up animal bones (to be blunt: they were recycling bones!). But those days were long gone by then and Lever Brothers later bought out Whittaker Chambers who created his own line of cleaning products and even bottled his own washing detergent in the 1950s! If you want cheap washing detergent you should try Leverbrand or Phoenix Brand.
The way this company is doing it is even more innovative than Whittaker Chambers did decades earlier: instead of making an entire new product line from scratch it simply buys one existing product (which makes sense because these products already exist) and changes its packaging while retaining everything else on its current market. This gives them an opportunity to improve on the current product without changing its market-wide positioning or brand image — which would be unwieldy if the product changed significantly over time due to new innovations about manufacturing process or
How To Use Dolled Up Shampoo to Make Your Hair
This is one of my favorite posts on Kickstarter and one of my favorite ways to help people get started with crowdfunding. Some of the things I’ve learned from doing this:
1. Follow your audience when they ask questions
2. Create a wishlist before you launch, and then follow up with it
3. Use Twitter and Facebook to develop your fanbase
4. Use the right tool for your job
5. Get lots of feedback on your pitch, even if you aren’t sure what you want to do with it (and it may be that you aren’t even sure)
Advantages of Dolled Up Shampoo
I’ve been using shampoo for over 30 years — for myself and for others. In the last few years, I have become convinced that shampoo is one of the worst products on the planet.
The few people who have tried it love it, but most people don’t. It gets clogged up in your hair and you have to buy more shampoo to get out what’s there. It doesn’t lather well, so you need to brush it through your hair multiple times a day (and you may never stop). The nice part is that it’s so cheap — $3 per bottle! The bad part is that the cheaper it is, the more difficult it will be to find another bottle.
This has been my experience with shampoo every day since I was a teen: 1) There are three types of shampoo: regular (which works with an average lifespan of 5-10 days) which costs $3-$8 per bottle; gel which lasts about as long as regular, but costs about $4; and foam which lasts about as long as gel but costs about $8-. I often buy all three bottles at once when I see one on sale and use them up in two or three weeks (I live in a small city with no grocery store).
2) When I first started using shampoo, my hair was kind of flat (no volume), but after a few weeks of daily use, my hair got thicker and thicker as I continued using shampoo for several months.
3) After about 2-3 months, my scalp started growing bald spots on top of my head and my hairline receded noticeably (which lasted until age 25).
4) After 6 months or so, after getting progressively worse over the next 9 months or so (and then finally getting worse again), by age 17 or 18 I had grown out most of my then-shaggy back-and-side waves.
5) Then by age 21 , I had grown out some of my front waves while keeping most of them in front layers only. By then they were almost all flat wisps clinging to me under arms and shoulders. By age 23 , no longer able to grow back length at all due to gravity, they looked like what people used to call “bearded little kids” in the olden days before modern plastic surgery could do anything about them (the original image being a bearded baby from plaster casts from skeletal casts
Conclusion
This is a fun one. It’s one of those science-fiction scenarios that I dream about, when we can wake up and find we invented a way for our product to be more successful than it was on launch day.
It’s like the story of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, where they decide to take the universe into their own hands and make it their own. This is what happened on Dropbox:
“We are not going to let you sell this product in your store, because you have no idea what your users actually want.” – Dropbox
“This is what they really wanted,” said George, in his very best Marvin Marvin Marvin voice… “a super-fast way to store everything you see on your screen.” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The thing with our product — and any new startup at any industry, really — is that once you know who your users are, and how they use your product, then you can work out how it should be designed and how it should work for them. And if someone has great insight into that subject matter, then this blog post from Brian Solis can do an excellent job.
I cannot thank him enough for writing this amazing piece of content that could not have been written without his hard work.