What selling thousands of DIY kits taught me about who does the work
John Gist and I started RELIC in my garage during the pandemic. Six years and thousands of kits later, the biggest lesson is that the person who buys a kit is rarely the one who makes it.
About a month into the pandemic, John Gist and I noticed the same thing about our days. All we did was stare at screens. Work was Zoom calls, and so was everything else. Our threshold for it was lower back then, and neither of us wanted that to be our lives.
We had an itch to get outside and use our hands. I had a small garage, and it became the place where we tried things. RELIC started there, as experiments on a workbench.
John and I have been close collaborators for about twenty years, and even closer friends. Starting something together was never the hard part.
Our first kit, and the 25 people who never finished it
The first box was a knife making kit. It was a real project. You needed a saw, clamps, a vise, glue, a drill, a lot of patience, and some muscle to pull it all together.
We made 25 and sold out the first run.
Three months later we learned that not a single person had finished their kit.
That number told us more than the sellout did. Selling out showed that people liked the idea. Nobody finishing showed what the kit actually asked of them. So we pivoted to kits that were less involved.
Why we stopped being a subscription
RELIC began as a monthly subscription box. The knife kits are why it didn't stay one. If nobody could finish the first box in three months, another box every month only made the pile bigger. We moved to on demand, so people buy a kit when they want one.
Who actually opens the box?
The bigger lesson took us years. About 99% of our sales are gifts. It's very rare for the person who buys a RELIC kit to be the person who does the work.
We can see that because of a QR code. Every kit has one that opens the instructions, and the scans show us who is actually making the thing.
That changed how we think about every kit. The buyer picks it, and the person who receives it decides whether it gets made. The people receiving them want a project they can finish in under 30 minutes. So over the years we've adjusted the complexity of the kits to fit.
The 85% who want to, and the 25% who do
Our research showed that 85% of people in our demographic, ages 35 to 54, want to learn more skills and work more with their hands. Less than 25% of them take the initiative to do it.
We decided to build for the people in that gap, and we found a strong following.
When every season is different
RELIC is highly seasonal, and sales swing a lot, especially through Shopify Collective, where other stores sell our kits. To keep up, we needed to be able to scale. That meant holding a large inventory and being able to replenish quickly.
Today we run RELIC as a dropship lifestyle business. We've sold thousands of kits, and RELIC merchandise is dropshipped too, through Printful.
What I believe now
People are highly aspirational. Most of us want to make things, and far fewer of us start. A sold out run of knife kits looked like success until we learned nobody had finished one.