A troll who accidentally funded a pottery studio
The letter that backfired. Beautifully.
Today’s story is about an anonymous letter so spectacularly unhelpful that it sold out a pottery studio in a single day, pulled in customers from 9,500 miles away, and put a one-woman Michigan business on the Today show.
Welcome to Bella Joy Pottery, the Michigan studio of Heidi Fahrenbacher.
Every piece is handmade for the everyday rituals of life, with the intention “to make you smile, to bring you a little joy.”
It’s hard to imagine looking at all this and deciding what was needed was a complaint letter.
But that’s exactly what happened.
Heidi was already having a rough day when she opened her mail and found an anonymous letter. Someone had actually sat down, found a stamp, and mailed a physical letter specifically to tell Heidi that her art was terrible and her business was a joke.
Heidi decided to laugh it off. She posted the letter to a small-business memes account on Instagram and went to bed.
Then the internet woke up.
Her post had gone viral overnight, and people from as far away as Australia, more than 9,500 miles from her studio, started snapping up her pots, mugs, vases and pretty much anything else they could get their hands on.
She sold out everything in a day.
What normally took her about a month to sell disappeared in 24 hours.
“I probably could have sold old pots from my garage,” Heidi said. “It was insane.”
The sudden burst of attention brought a wave of media coverage, including a feature on the Today show. Heidi even began keeping a small supply of unglazed pottery on hand in case one of her designs went viral again.
Somebody wrote that letter hoping to take Heidi down a peg.
Instead, they helped sell out her entire shop.
The internet looked at the letter, then looked at the pottery, and went: “Where can I buy one?”
That’s some joyful poetic justice.
Heidi’s own philosophy has a poetic quality to it too: “Life is better when you enjoy the small things.”
And somehow, a snippy, anonymous note ended up getting people to enjoy those small things for themselves.
Until the next plot twist…
Monojoy
Storyteller, Oddly Obvious
PS: Creativity has a funny way of turning the unexpected into an advantage.
Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s great creative minds, left behind a treasure trove of ideas, beautifully captured in Doris Willens’ Nobody’s Perfect: Bill Bernbach and the Golden Age of Advertising.
Suit yourselves. We prefer to brush past the competition.
Because good stories like good company:
