Idea 155 of 500. Cluster 7: The infrastructure that makes the rest possible
Packing, dispatch and international shipping services
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
Every idea in cluster 7 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Collect quotes from three couriers for sending a 1 kg and a 5 kg parcel to London, Toronto and Melbourne, and put them in one table. Then ask 10 small producers who sell online how they ship abroad now and what it costs them. If pooling their parcels beats their current cost, offer to ship next month's orders at a fixed price per parcel.
- Who pays first
- A small online seller who loses foreign orders because shipping one parcel at a time costs more than the product.
- What leaves today
- Foreign orders are turned away because shipping is too expensive one parcel at a time, so the finished product never leaves at all.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
- Ch. SeventeenOne Building
The dozen small things that turn a product into money that stays
More from cluster 7
Idea 155 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.