Tell us about your Boomf, how did you come up with this crazy idea?
James had a previous business printing on cakes. People loved them, but shipping them was expensive and fraught with difficulty. Andy had worked on StickyGram, which made Instagram fridge magnets. A clever thing about StickyGram is that it was designed around what could be sent as a first class letter. When we got together, we were keen to find a way of combining the best of both businesses: a personalised treat that shipped well. Initial experiments were all around cup cakes, but they had to be very small and ungenerous to fit in a first class envelope. Than James had a brainwave about marshmallows, and suddenly everything clicked.
How does it work?
It is pretty quick. If you order by 12, we’ll dispatch them same day and you should get them the day after. It’s an incredibly secret process, staffed by our crack squandron of Ompah Luumpahs who are hand-picked for their discretion.
What were the biggest obstacles launching Boomf and how did you overcome them?
The biggest problem was getting the images on marshmallows! Marshmallows are tricky little customers. They are sticky, hard to cut accurately and unwilling to present a consistent surface. It wasn’t one big thing that allowed us to break down the marshmallow’s resistance. Just lots of little innovations. Humans have brains and marshmallows do not, so we knew that if keep at it, eventually we would outwit them and then non-co-operative tendencies.
What were the funniest pics printed on marshmallows so far? Or What do people like to print on marshmallows?
We received a job application on a set of Boomf which was sweet. It went all the way through our system without us noticing, and then got delivered back to us in the post. We get dogs, lots of dogs. We had some pictures of a Scottish lady doing something truly unmentionable. That’s been the one instance to date where we had to say no and offer a refund.
What does the future has in store for your company?
We’ve just launched in Selfridge with our Boomf on Demand service. This allows us to create personalised marshmallows live. We see a big strategic opportunity in real-time marshmallow printing. Also, we will keep improving the marshmallows, do a big push in America and launch a new product that we’ve got just below our sleeve.
Social links:
Twitter: @boomf
Instagram: @boomf
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Boomfmallows
Website: http://boomf.com