How To Make Millions With Napkins

By admin at August 29, 2007 | 3:59 am | Print

ABC Reported:
Who: Emmanuel Kastanias
Age: 24
Where: Sydney
Company: NapkinAd
What they’ve done: Puts advertising on napkins
Everyone uses them and by their nature, napkins are in your face.

A blank space perfect for scribbling down notes, it occurred to Emmanuel that napkins would be great for advertisements too.

Emmanuel says he found the idea staring him in the face while he was eating.

“I was looking at the napkin for 15 minutes. It’s actually a very powerful medium when you look at it from a marketing perspective, not just as a napkin,” he says.

“Not everybody needs a straw, or a knife, or a placemat, but everybody needs a napkin so it’s a commodity that is very accessible and in demand.”

Emmanuel designed perspex stands for the napkins that are also covered in advertising, targeting the thousands of consumers threading their way through food courts in various shopping malls.

“People actually use the stands like pamphlet holders,” he says.

“They’re targeted by the stand, pick up a napkin like a pamphlet, put it in their pocket and walk off.”

Emmanuel now has stands in three locations and 20 businesses advertising.

Pitching his advertising napkins to the shopping centres was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do, says Emmanuel.

“You’re out of your comfort zone and a shopping centre itself is a very large organisation – you’re dealing with quite senior people.

“My very first negotiation, I was literally slaughtered,” he says.

“It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was an experience I guess I had to have.”

After a disastrous first meeting, Emmanuel says he learned a good pitch was a quick pitch, and to clearly state what’s in it for the company.

Building relationships with his clients was also crucial.

“I was lucky to some extent with people because I managed to build a rapport with some of the people there who thought ‘Ok, here’s a young guy. We’ll give him a chance and see what he can come up with’,” he says.

Some of the clients advertising on the napkins didn’t have a website, so he built them one, even though it meant teaching himself how to do it.

“You’re competing against a lot of people, a lot of very large customers, and the only thing that you can really beat them in is customer service. That’s the one thing you have on top of them. So it’s very important that you maintain that customer relationship, and you offer your customers whatever they need.”

Emmanuel says finding investors has been nearly impossible, even after he self-funded the building of the stands and proved his product in the market, but he’s not letting that slow him down.

“The plan is to be in every shopping centre across Australia, to have every person going to lunch each day and using one of my napkins,” he says.
More at:http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/stories/s1783823.htm

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