04–08–25
We’re now moving into the business development phase
and with that our team is growing. We now have a team of 4 inclduing myself which includes myself as the CEO, we brought on an engineer/product designer, project manager and marketing manager, and my father helping however he can from attaining patent lawyers, setting up an LLC, and a business bank account to go with it.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time building out the notion and linking a google drive to store files for brainstorming and research purposes. We’ve also worked on organizing our expenses, tasks, manufactur updates, and essentially as much business related organization as we can.
I’ve been spending most of my time working on getting first iteration prototype to get a sense of scale and see how it feels to be a real in-truck product. So far I have the baseplate, sleeping platform, and tray working roughly (not much is secured to be real use but it’s all in place). I’m going to move forward with putting in shelving on the right side as well as experiment with baseplate hole types and locking mechanisms for accesories. Pictured to the left are some ideas we’ve been over both good and bad. Another thought I had is a hollow threaded bolts that you just run through the baseplate and secure on the backside just as you would a traditional nut and bolt. The idea there is that we would just have a ton of these bolts and nuts in stock and by order just assemble them ourselves so by the time the customer gets it the baseplate is just full of threaded holes ready for accesories.
Our engineer has been using 3D printing for prototyping a cantilever locking mechanism that can be used for the bed platform. It uses a simple spring that allows the user to just push the button in and slip it below the baseplate.
We’re nailing down our baseplate design so we can then send that off to manufacurers to get some real in person prototypes to test.
Our current fundraising plan is to get a legitimized prototype that is fully functional and looks aesthetically appealing so we can capture marketing material (photos and videos) for social media and advertisements. We will then pair this with high end 3D animations and lock down a patent. Once the patent is secured we will employ a marketing campaign and work towards building a public presence and a brand. We will then secure preorders and these preordes will be our main source of fundraising at least for the first round shipments to customers
My belief and what I see as the future of the Rossco brand is to employ a strategy similar to Red Bull (but at a smaller scale obviousy), where instead of our social media platforms emphasizing new featueres and just basic product information, we prioritize first the public relation of the brand. Red Bull puts branding first and product second as far as publicity goes and obviously behind the scenes we are spending a majority of our time building a reliable and bullet proof product. 99% of Red Bull’s social media posts empahasize first the emation and appeal of just the brand. For example instead of talking about they’re new flavor that also is sugar free with 0 additives! They’re just sending a guy off a cliff in a wingsuit and the Red Bull brand is slapped across his back and he just happens to take a sip of a Red Bull before he does it. I don’t want our social medias to just be a collection of products specs, I want it to be a brand that does cool, fun to watch, adventures to spur on a following of people that want to take in their part of the fun, and in turn, will purchase our product and be emotionally connected to it.
Marketing plan proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yxhNUmmG4mEC9otduI1GWZW9WXLfiN6T0cM6WdgJbIw/edit?usp=sharing
Red Bull Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/redbull/
Big Overland Brand Instagrams:
https://www.instagram.com/roamadventureco/
https://www.instagram.com/goosegear/
https://www.instagram.com/nokhugear/