Originally published in the New York Times 3/21/10
By AMY WALLACE
JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.
Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying things like “Useless Info” and “When Pigs Fly”; list pads titled “All Out Of” and “Things You Must Do to Make Me Happy”; flashcards for parenting, slang use and sex; and kits to aid in decision-making, dating, and even decision-making during dating.
She has also written “The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You” and designed a series of guided journals with names like “I Can’t Sleep” and “My Dysfunctions.”
Along the way, her annual revenue has grown to more than $6.3 million. Her company motto is, “We put the fun in functional,” but she acknowledges that the company’s voice is more confessional than practical.
“A core aspect of Knock Knock’s identity is justifying my own inadequacies, which has, I think, struck a chord in our customers,” she says, sitting in Knock Knock’s headquarters in Venice, Calif.
But oh, the lessons she’s learned. Like this one: “Great, creative inspiration feels so good. But translating that into a good business decision — well, it’ll probably take longer than your inspiration did.”
Ms. Bilik is a businesswoman who never planned to go into business — or, as she puts it, “an artist who looked at the guys with the polyester suits buying ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ in the airport as such chumps” who then became a chump herself. (But she does wear all-natural fibers: “I put my foot down on the polyester.”)
She is also a funny lady who has successfully leveraged her sense of humor, but not without skinning her knees a few times. By her reckoning, she has made “a thousand and a half mistakes” and at least a few “über-mistakes.”
Notably, though, many of the very things that led to her mistakes also yielded her successes. It’s the old “your strength is your weakness” paradox: Ms. Bilik has been known to spend 20 hours writing a greeting card about the history of Valentine’s Day, for example, because it made her happy to do so. Without that off-center sensibility, she wouldn’t have anything worth selling.
And without that drive to create — a passion that, for her, borders on devotion — she wouldn’t have had the energy to start Knock Knock in the first place. But the fact remains: 20 hours spent on a card that will earn her company only $10,000 — “at most!” — isn’t smart business.
“We put so much into the products, which is part of the problem with our business model,” she says. “We put too much work into them for the amount of money we’re getting out of them. We’re really trying to address that right now.”
Knock Knock, whose products are sold in about 5,000 stores in the United States alone, has at least two philosophies that drive sales. One is aspirational organization, the idea that if you offer people a way to keep tidy track of their takeout menus or their home maintenance projects or their pets, they will enjoy buying it even if they don’t ever put it to use. One big seller is the Personal Library Kit, which equips the buyer with checkout cards and a date stamp to make sure that books they lend to friends will be returned.
Another guiding philosophy is that people enjoy having the last word — and will pay to do so. Knock Knock makes a self-inking stamp that says, “Deal With This,” followed by five checkable boxes: For Me, Now, Quietly, Correctly and Or Else. A “Complaint” sticky offers boxes for “Whose Fault” (Mine, Yours, Ours, Other) and “Desired Outcome” (Apology, Explanation, Litigation, Change).
An instant-apology pad lists types of infractions (Behavior, Words, Action or Inaction) and “Reasons for My Behavior,” ranging from “I forgot” to “I was drunk” to “I was traumatized in childhood.” A new set of fabric-bound books, “Lines for All Occasions,” offers suggested excuses, lies, insults, comebacks, pep talks, pick-ups and come-ons.
