Chris Barnado and Richard Blakesley are hoping that more gift retailers will stock their wand-like remote control.
Entrepreneurs Chris Barnado and Richard Blakesley have developed a product that has sold more than 100,000 units across the world in the past two years, but they feel their creation still has an awful lot of potential to fulfil and they’re looking to the gift market for help.
If you haven’t heard of the pair before then they invented the ‘Kymera’, a device that looks like it came straight out of a Harry Potter film and can control TVs, lights and music systems with a casual flick of the wrist.
When they appeared on Dragons’ Den, panellist Duncan Bannatyne was so impressed by what he saw that he offered them £200,000 for 30% equity in the firm, reducing to 10% if they achieved a £1.2m profit in their first year.
While viewers would have seen the pair accept that proposal, they never actually ended up taking the money. For various reasons, they didn’t meet up with Bannatyne until some months after filming by which time the original need for the investment — to buy pre-Christmas stocks for the product — had diminished due to its 15-week lead time.
Although they have coped well enough without the injection of capital, they are quick to acknowledge the impact that their appearance on the show has had on the brand.
“Being on Dragons’ Den made a huge difference to The Wand Company in terms of the publicity and exposure which that sort of thing gives you,” says Barnado.
In the UK, the Kymera has been most successful in areas where companies sell unique and interesting wares, straddling the boundary between gifts and gadgets. Online retailers such as Firebox.com, IWantOneOfThose.com and FindMeAGift.com have all shifted their fair share of wands since they became available to the market.
Blakesley says: “We work with something like 100 retailers in about 30 countries at the moment and on the whole we have gone to smaller, independent retailers looking for unusual gadgets or gifts. We have also got the sort of headline ones like Harrods, but we are aiming to grow our coverage of the independent high street gift retailers.”
One of the obstacles the company has faced up to now is that the Kymera doesn’t fit into an obvious product category. The fact that some consider it a piece of technology or gadget and others regard it a novelty gift has left certain retailers facing a “tricky” situation, according to Blakesley.
“We have spoken to a few department stores and while some of them have taken the product, others just can’t work out where it should sit in their store. That is a challenge we hadn’t foreseen when we developed the product. We thought that having such a unique, cross-category thing would be a benefit, but obviously it has made it difficult for some buyers to work out where to put it.”
The product’s £50 price tag may also have put some of the more traditional gift shops off from stocking it, although the pair insist the product’s originality, high quality packaging and general perceptibility warrant the price point.
That said, the company is taking additional steps to endear itself to smaller independents and high street players. It recently exhibited at Autumn Fair to make contact with buyers, while efforts to improve its merchandising resources are ongoing.
An online video has just been launched to show how the product can be best demonstrated in a retail environment and its website now contains a plethora of point-of-sale material for retailers to download.
“We are going for a slightly new approach, which is not to send out hard copies of the point of sale but to let our retailers download it and then print it out and use it,” says Barnado.
For those retailers that like the idea of selling an unusual concept such as a wand but are concerned the price point might be prohibitive to their customer base, the pair have a second product in their armoury: the Kandela, a flameless LED candle controlled by a wand. The Kandela has been repackaged to be more retail-friendly and with a RRP of just under £35, it is £15 cheaper than its predecessor.
Barnado is adamant that both the Kymera and Kandela represent a good revenue opportunity for gift retailers that have not previously stocked such a unique product.
“If you talk to people in the street you’ll find people who have heard of it, but there are very many people who haven’t heard of it and those are the people we are trying to reach. Through the thousands of independent resellers that we could go and get the product into, we hope to start rolling it out to more homes in the country,” says Barnado.
While he probably wishes he could solve that challenge with a wave of his wand, it’s clear that good-old fashioned retail development work holds the key to the company selling its next 100,000 units.
