$1 Million In Sales By Mailing Balls

Happy Friday!

For today’s email, I decided it was time to throw it all the way back to Season 1.

It’s one of the more unique business models that I’ve ever heard of, and surprisingly, it’s still working all these years later.

Let me tell you how two sisters make over $1 million a year mailing balls.

Let’s get to it!

If you don’t remember this pitch, let me recap it for you. And if you don’t remember the pitch, don’t worry, it’s been a while—it aired in October 2009.

Michele and Melisa are sisters who found themselves starting a business after a random man at the post office asked them to mail a ball for them.

Just like that, Send-A-Ball was born.

The idea was simple. Put fun messages on a ball and mail them to a friend or family member.

For example, if a friend was recovering from surgery you could mail them a ball that says “Bounce Back Soon“.

At the time of the pitch, Michele and Melisa were mailing 50-75 balls a day out of Michele’s garage and had hit the maximum capacity with their manufacturer.

They need money from a shark (specifically $86,000) to bring the manufacturing process in-house and get out of the garage.

Surprisingly, the sisters have a strong profit margin of $15 per order. It only costs $5 to mail a ball, and customers purchase them for $20.

Unfortunately for Michele and Melisa, none of the sharks were interested in making an offer. They all had their reasons, but it mostly boiled down to the fact that mailing a ball wasn’t propriety and that the sisters were already doing just fine on their own.

Despite walking away without a deal, things have worked out just well for Michele and Melisa.

Like most companies that pitch on Shark Tank, Send-A-Ball received a big boot in sales for a little while.

They also benefited from getting their company in front of a large audience.

As the sharks mentioned, sending a ball in the mail is not proprietary, and many copycats have appeared over the years.

Despite this, Send-A-Ball has continued to grow and now does around $1 million in revenue every year.

If you’d like to mail a ball to someone, you can do so through the Send-A-Ball website. Prices have gone from $20 to $22.99, but shipping is still free!

That’s all for this week’s update! Let me know what you think about it by voting in the poll below.

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Talk soon,
Andrew Smith