Thanks Bro is an idea Josh Folan had been sitting on for several years. A girl that Folan dated and he had this running joke. Every time there was a holiday; Valentine’s Day or other gift-giving event, this girl would ask him ‘what do you want?’ to which he’d always reply, ‘I don’t know; beef jerky and beer’.
Beef jerky and beer. Something Folan told me during our recent conversation he covets “a guy commodity.”
The idea for Thanks Bro was that much more accelerated when Folan went under the knife.
“I had some major reconstructive surgery and the guy did it pro- bono,” Folan told me. “I wanted to send him a thank you. This is New York you should be able to find anything, right?” He said he queried his Thanks Bro concept on websites like delivery.com; the closest he could come up with? “Jack Links and Budweiser.”
Mortified, Folan says he “…wound up sending the surgeon Edible Arrangements; chocolate covered oranges or something like that.”
Some time later Folan was “…downtown shooting a commercial with a buddy of mine and I saw a brick and mortar Edible Arrangements. I mentioned to him my idea and he replied; ‘Why aren’t we doing that?’ I told him I didn’t’ have an answer.”
The best laid plans have started out from less. Inspired Folan went to work: “So I came home after that and built the website in about two days; pumped it up on Twitter and Facebook. Urban Daddy got their hands on it; did a pretty big piece on it; and that pretty much sent us careening into business.”
Custom ordering is the name of the game for Thanks Bro. While Folan admits they have and use many familiar names and pre-determined packages, he says he “…would prefer if every email that came in was a new idea.” Folan likes the concept of being able to put “…something together from scratch as opposed to the named packages on our website.” Still he admits convenience or lack of knowledge often trumps ingenuity; customers often just pick one of the in-house packages for their order.
Folan tells me he works with a beer guy; ” Good Beer on 9th Street.” This beer guy has on-tap available to some six hundred plus types of single bottle, craft micro brews. Put simply there is “no Budweiser; no Coors Light;” so whomever you’re getting these brews for will know you’ve put the time in. If you’re not sure of the type of beer your gift recipient might like, the team at Good Beer can surely help guide you just based on what’s in your recipients refrigerator. Even just the theme for the recipient can take you on strange journeys you’ve never imagined.
For the jerky portion of Thanks Bro, Folan tells me he keeps beef jerky on hand. “All the jerky we carry are top line specialty brands; and each have something distinct about them.”
That’s it; about as simple a concept as you could imagine but ingenious in its execution. If you have someone you want to give a special gift to who never seems satisfied by anything, Thanks Bro could be the place for you. If you want to get even with someone who’s done you wrong, Thanks Bro has a series of gifts I can’t repeat the name of right here. The title of these gifts uses the two word expletive meaning the opposite of “Thanks,” though.
Sources:
www.thanks-bro.com
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8413215/on_the_record_josh_folan.html?cat=40
www.goodbeernyc.com