Entrepreneur Elon Musk has sold hats worth $1 million in a very short time by following a very simple marketing idea. Having sold out an entire line of 50,000 hats in just over a month, he has proved that he can be successful in things other than making futuristic cars and launching space programmes.
The idea of starting a new entity came into Musk’s mind in December 2016 when he was stuck in traffic in gridlock on a Los Angeles freeway. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” he wrote on Twitter
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
The aim of opening ‘The Boring Company’ was to connect the subterranean parts of Los Angeles via the tunnel system. Along with this, he wanted to sell a bunch of hats. While the main task is yet to complete Musk has succeeded by selling more hats than he expected.
Musk launched the branded baseball cap back in March 2017 and the company was able to sell only 4,000 hats until October.
Almost 4000 hats sold so far. Whoever buys the 5000th gets a free hat with their hat! https://t.co/x87eVge68U
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2017
The sales were normal before Elon announced that the company will only produce 50,000 units of hats. The next update from Elon on this came after few days when the company had sold 30,000 hats.
Over 30,000 hats sold!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2017
Just after few minutes, he revealed that the company will start selling The Boring Company flamethrower after 50k sales of the hat.
After 50k hats, we will start selling The Boring Company flamethrower
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2017
And as expected, the remaining 20,000 hats were sold very quickly.
Hats sold out, flamethrowers soon!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2017
The price of one such plain black cap is $20. In this way, the Boring Company, with the simple white logo of Musk’s tunneling firm, has raised $1million for the venture.
With this, Elon has given a great lesson for marketers that if something is sold by following the basics of marketing one can still achieve success in this ever-changing world.
