Ship Snow, Yo! started in February 2015 by Kyle & Jessica Waring.
Built in the depths of the worst blizzard Boston has seen in decades (Juno), Ship Snow, Yo! emerged with 1 goal in mind: to ship historic Boston snow!
Kyle & Jess were shoveling their walkway and thought it would be funny to send friends in California a package of snow. Little did they know, Boston would have a record-breaking snowfall that year, with blizzards unloading 110.6" of snow within 2 months!
The rest of this page is written by Kyle Waring, and depicts the launch of Ship Snow, Yo! from his perspective.
Starting Small
After thinking through the logistics of shipping snow, I had to start small. The general idea at the time was to build an MVP (minimum viable product). To me, the most immediate and viable option was to empty out a water bottle and fill it up with snow.
Jess and I hand packed each order, and even took a "before" picture. We went as far as drawing a special character on the bottle, giving it a unique and handmade look and feel.
They were intended to be joke gifts, something you'd send to your friend in Florida who can't keep from bragging about the sunshine.
Our goal was to see if people would be interested in buying snow online... and as far as our research went, there weren't any companies shipping natural snow. There were some fake snow products, or snow guns for large scale -- mountain sized products. Nothing really fit the consumer who just wanted to have a little snowball fight.
I ended up so excited about the project that I came up with v1 of our website within hours of coming up with the idea.
I listed the snow shipments for sale at $12.99... and after 24hrs we had 100+ orders and knew immediately that we were onto something big.
It snowballed. The press started writing about our business and it went viral... all within 19 days of being open.
We went from a joke gift to a 100% serious guaranteed-snow-on-arrival product in 2 weeks.
By shipping larger quantities of Snow, we figured that with the fastest shipping possible... we could minimize the Snow melting with a Styrofoam container!
Our first successful shipment arrived in Florida on February 17th, 2015.
Since then, we've shipped over 2,500 lbs and are providing Christmas Eve delivery dates this year in 2016!
To date we've shipped Snow to 37 different states and 3 countries.
In 2015 we were also named Boston Globe's "Most Creative Startup of 2015"
As it turns out, people are serious about playing with snow!
Merry Christmas.
- Kyle
