2018 has been a truly amazing year for this company.

The first seven months of 2018, things were pretty quiet at Hideaway Solutions. We made the occasional sale. Our social media presence was slowly growing. There was an exciting moment in July when we got our 100th Instagram follower and could start seeing post insights. Likewise, for search, we were blogging and targeting keywords and slowly rising in the rankings.

In the “real world” things were also progressing…slowly. We set up a booth at the 68th New England Home Show. There we got a lot of enthusiasm…and even ended up with a few orders. However, it wasn’t quite coming together as we envisioned it. That all changed radically starting on August 1.

The Challenge

The challenge as we saw it was that we needed to get the Step 180 into kitchen showrooms so people who were in the market for a new kitchen could see and try the cabinet step stool. The problem was that many kitchen showrooms were hesitant to go all in with such a revolutionary design without proven customer demand. So we faced a Catch-22. We knew that if enough people saw the Step 180, they’d demand their kitchen installer order it for their next kitchen…but we didn’t have the money for enough advertising to achieve the critical mass of customer demand and industry support. Attempts to use social media as a cheap go-around were semi-successful. A lot of people loved the product…but unfortunately, most of them weren’t in the market for a new kitchen.

The Viral Miracle

Everything changed the evening of July 31. A user of the site Imgur was poking around the Internet, looking for cool gadgets to post in one of the communities there. He found a GIF we had on our website and shared it. It took off and soon it spread to Reddit where it caused such a ruckus that it ended up on the front page of the site. The one problem was that it had been posted as “Cupboard Steps”, which weren’t keywords that we had been using. Fortunately, a quick blog post about the incident fixed that problem.

The day after, things quieted down and we felt a little concern that perhaps it was going to pass like the previous bouts of online fame, where there’s a lot of commotion, but little in the way or results. Hundreds of thousands of people had seen the Step 180 and quite a few had found their way to our website. However, traffic began to drop off fairly quickly. It would appear that the overlap between Redditors and people in the market for a new kitchen isn’t a huge one.

Reddit does have one big thing going for it, however. It’s where everyone who works for more mainstream media companies goes to find cutting-edge stories. Suddenly our inbox was full of requests from companies with massive Facebook pages, requesting to use our content to show the world the Step 180.

Who We Are Thankful To This Thanksgiving

Unilad was the first to post with a quick video that got 17 million views.

Then AOL’s In The Know Innovation shared this one, which has 89 million views (and almost a million shares).

…those two videos were followed by many, many more.

The Step 180 was also featured on:

UNILAD Tech
Pretty 52
Sia Magazin
VT
LADBible
Sais-tu aimer ?
The délire
Video Snacks
Woodclans
9Honey
NOKO Art & Design
Bored Panda
bouncy / バウンシー
Nifty
MEENopDesign
Yahoo Now
Panda Curioso
Daily Mail
Home Insider
Core77
Geniale Technik
Daily Rad
Cheddar
Interesting Engineering
Gadget Flow
The Red Ferret
Best Online Cabinets
Neozone
Creapills

It’s hard to keep a running total of how many video views of the Step 180 have happened since the beginning of August, but it’s likely over 150 million. (By way of comparison, the Super Bowl has an audience of 103 million.)

New Challenges

As you might imagine, 150+ million video views resolved the “lack of exposure” problem. We had gone from somewhat facetiously asking if the Step 180 was “The Kitchen Cabinet Accessory of 2018” back in February to actually wondering when the last time a kitchen appliance got so much media attention was. The phone started ringing off the hook and emails flooded in. We expected it would take a couple weeks for orders to roll in, given that the Step 180 would require a redesign of customers’ kitchen plans before they made orders. Nope, they happened almost immediately, starting August 4th and they haven’t stopped since.

Suddenly, the manufacturing side of the business went from being almost an afterthought to the biggest priority. We knew how to make the step stools. We just didn’t know how to make them as fast as the orders were coming in. Most of our marketing efforts shifted from trying to sell stools to managing the expectations of people placing orders, while we worked to streamline the manufacturing process…while simultaneously exploring all sorts of options in regards to increasing production.

Meanwhile, we were also being inundated by people in other countries who wanted their own Step 180. We were trying to find out the way to actually ship commercial products overseas, which was an overly confusing process to try to plan for…but quite a bit simpler in practice. Unfortunately, we’ve also come to learn that most kitchen cabinets across the globe don’t match American cabinet dimensions, so the Step 180 will need to be redesigned for overseas markets.

The Customers

We really need to thank the people who have ordered the Step 180. Many were doing so having never seen one in real life, just putting faith in our videos and our word. We thank you for your faith in us and we hope the Step 180s are making your kitchens better places to be.

Looking Forward

Hideaway Solutions is growing. We’re hiring new employees and expanding production. This means that we’ll be able to start talking to the larger companies who expressed an interest in the Step 180 way back in August. We’re also looking forward to creating a version (or versions) that will fit the overseas markets that are so enthusiastic about the product.

In the meantime, we want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!