💌 $300 Million Worth of 3D Cards

Happy Friday!

Sending cards in the mail is a bit old-fashioned, but it’s hard to beat the feeling of receiving a thoughtful card in the mail.

Today, I am going to tell you about two friends who combined 3D art with cards and turned it into $300 million in sales.

Let’s get to it!

Lovepop was pitched on Shark Tank Season 7 by John Wise and Wombi Rose. These two friends and Harvard Business School grads were inspired by some artwork they saw while on a trip to Japan.

They realized that there was nothing like this in the United States and saw a great opportunity to put beautiful 3D artwork into cards.

I mean, just look at how beautiful these cards are!

John and Wombi have a background in designing ships and were able to use those skills to create 3D designs for the cards.

Once a design is complete, they are laser cut into the card to create a magical 3D effect.

Lovepop had been in business for about a year and a half when it pitched on Shark Tank and is selling its cards through four kiosks at malls in Boston.

So far, they’ve done around $300,000 in sales. Each machine costs about $20,000 to install, but John and Wombi say that each machine is on track to do $240,000 in sales a year.

On that $240,000, they’ll make $40,000 in profit.

Their main goal is to use the kiosks as profitable marketing to bring customers onto the Lovepop site, where they’ll have higher profit margins.

However, only 34 people have converted from the kiosk to a website so far.

Barbara, Lori, and Mark all dropped out for various reasons, mainly citing a confusing business model and too high of a valuation.

Thankfully for John and Wombi, Robert and Kevin were both interested and made individual offers of $300,000 for 20% equity.

Kevin felt like he could sell a lot of cards through his existing database of wedding customers.

Meanwhile, Robert was excited about helping them build their retail presence and then converting those customers to the website.

After some back-and-forth, they ended up negotiating a deal with Kevin for $300,000 and 15% equity.

Fast-forward just three months, and Lovepop received an update segment in which they shared that the deal with Kevin went through and that they had grown from $300,000 in lifetime sales to over $8.7 million!

Kevin introduced them to the creators of the Billboard Music Awards, and that led to Lovepop creating the cards for the 2017 Billboard Music Awards.

Further, they’ve since worked with companies like Disney and Illumination to create cards for Star Wars, Marvel, the Minions, Harry Potter, Friends, and more!

By 2022, Lovepop had over $150 million in sales and had taken on $22.5 million in investments to skyrocket growth.

Now, they’ve done over $300 million in sales and are showing no signs of slowing down!

You can find all of Lovepops cards on its website or in retail stores across the US!

That’s a wrap on today’s email. Thanks for reading!

Before you go, take a second to let me know what you thought of it!

Talk soon,
Andrew Smith