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Over in a corner of my city, in the lovely Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, you'll find a long line queued up to see a certain flower. Just to give you an idea of how long this line is - Crown Heights resident Farah Marie waited for two hours.
Which flower are they waiting to see? The amorphophallus gigas, AKA the corpse flower, which has just bloomed for the first time. All this excitement? It's because it came to BBG in 2018 as a seedling from Malaysia, and took 7 years to bloom. And it will only bloom for a few days before closing for another 3-5 years.
Okay, but why the odd name?
Pretty simple. It's the smell.
"Yesterday at least was dead rat with a little garlic, a little burnt plastic. Today's been a little fainter, but it's still coming in waves, and I'm getting more of a stinky cheese, foot smell," Sprindis, the flower's caretaker, said.
Or in the simpler words of another visitor, "It's putrid."
Don't worry. The stink serves a purpose. This particular plant is pollinated by flies and beetles that normally lay their eggs in dead animals so the larvae has something to eat when they hatch. The plant's dead animal smell attracts those insects, causing them to pollinate it.
So let's summarize. The flower is stinky. It's horrible. It smells like a dead animal.
Yet it has a fan base lining up for hours to get a glimpse and a sniff.
Two things you can learn from the corpse flower:
- There's a market for everything in this world. If there are hundreds of people who will line up to smell a stinky flower, there are definitely hundreds of people out there to line up for your products. You just have to figure out who they are, and what message will bring them running.
- Scarcity draws the masses. Not fake scarcity, but real scarcity. That's the secret behind limited edition products.
But scarcity doesn't only have to be physical scarcity. Maybe your brand has a quality or trait that is rare and difficult to find. It can be your personalized customer service, a unique way of packaging your items, the founder's interesting personality. Even if your product itself is not groundbreaking or unique - if you dig in, you can find something about you that is special and rare.
Tell Your Story helps you find and highlight that rare trait, so you become a magnetic force drawing the people who crave what you have. If you're ready for long lines of excited fans, let's talk.
I'll visit the garden another time,
Chavy