How a Dummy Like Me Made it onto Jeopardy!

In 2016 I helped launch a men’s gift box brand. ACME Crate was a venture with a couple e-commerce partners I had worked with in the past. The concept was a series of 4 high-end gift boxes of survival, outdoor, and accessory products packed in an ammo crate.

I handled everything front-facing. Designing the logo, website, writing copy, shooting the product, and running the marketing campaign.

We had success in the past with organic social, blogs, and gear websites on our other brands, so that’s what I went with for ACME Crates.

Close to our Holiday-Season launch, our Product guy added one more crate. The CRATE OF DOOM.

This one was chock-full of every sword, baton, and grappling hook a mall ninja-style could dream of. It was priced 4x higher than the other SKUs and was packed in a wooden, Soviet-era machine gun crate - the kind of packaging that would be a nightmare to re-order.

I was working remotely at the time, and they shipped me a prototype to photograph. This thing was a beast. So, I dragged the coffin-sized crate out into a patch of cactus behind my place.

Sure, the product was a pain in the ass to handle, but it sure made my job a lot easier. We leaned into the absurdity of the product. The kind of thing that ignites our inner 14 year old boy.

We did a quiet launch of the website and saw a trickle of traffic from the organic of our sister-brands.

I got to work reaching out to my existing network of bloggers, gear websites, and tapped into some other channels that I was experimenting with, like Reddit.

And, within a few day, traffic had shot up 4,000%. Once the machine started, there was no stopping it. Just about every men’s lifestyle blog and magazine had picked it up. From Dude I Want That to Esquire. And the cover photo was almost always the Crate of Doom.

The more reasonable products moved, which I expected. People clicked through for the Crate of Doom but stayed for an elegant website designed by the one co-owner, well-composed and packaged product from the other co-owner, and my photos and copy that focused on the lifestyle elements. It was a great little gift for dad, or a co-worker.

But, what surprised me, was that people actually bought the Crate of Doom. And, within the week, all the 100lb+ crates were on trucks, en-route to be placed under someone’s Christmas tree.

I always looked back fondly on that campaign. One of my first I saw from the ground up. And what I consider a time-capsule in e-commerce. It said something about how organic social used to work. The role gear-roundup blogs played. How people engaged with new brands and how they ordered outside of the big marketplaces.

I left the company not long after that Holiday season. And it wasn’t until recently that I realized the impact this little pop-up brand had. A small project that felt kind of like a flash in the pan to me.

Somehow, the it seemed important enough that Holiday season that a writer for Jeopardy! thought it was worth building a clue around.

And it was only chance that this episode popped up on my Netflix. And of the 3 people that built this brand, I was the only one to have seen this episode!

I barely knew what I was doing back then. Flying by the seat of my pants. If we had sold all of our first-run units, that would have been an immense success to me. But we somehow did something even bigger. And it’s memorialized in episode #7426 of Jeopardy!