I Bought a Rock
Our awesome personal injury and marketing team just came out with brand new welcome boxes for our clients and I’m incredibly excited about using them. All sorts of thought and care went into their development—we thought about what sort of questions clients have about the legal process, what to expect from their experience with us and information about who will be working on their case. It really got me thinking about last weekend when I bought a rock.
You read that right—someone sold me a rock. And it wasn’t a functional rock like the kind you get at Home Depot after looking at your lawn and saying, “You know what this lawn needs? More rocks.” It was just an average rock you’d find in any parking lot or at the side of the road—but this rock is different. This rock was sold to me by a dog.
I was browsing social media like many of us do too much these days when I came across a TikTok video of a man and his elderly dog, Sativa. Sativa just loves rocks, and every time she and her human go for a walk, she finds a rock, plays with it, and brings it back. His cutesy videos are all about his pup, her rocks, and her big dream of being a small business owner. Each rock is “picked, cleaned, stress-tested, and carried inside by Sativa herself with no human intervention” before being listed on his Etsy page—DogFoundRocks.
I thought it was a cute idea. So, I checked out his store, and to my surprise, there was nothing available. Every rock had already been sold. More than that—apparently, every rock sells out almost immediately
after it’s listed. You had to check the store at four or five in the morning just to get one into your cart! These weren’t just rocks—these were exclusive rocks. Suddenly, I HAD to have one.
Finally, after a few weeks of early morning checkins, I was able to grab myself a “smooth wedgie” for seven dollars. It arrived in a small jewelry box with pretty paper filling and a paw-signed note from Sativa herself: “Thanks for supporting a ‘smol’ dog’s ‘smol’ business.” It was the best seven dollars I’d ever spent on a rock.
Buying this rock was an interesting exercise in evaluating my own behavior as a consumer and why I value things the way I do. I didn’t buy the rock because of its function. I bought it because of the way it made me FEEL. Would I have been this happy with my rock if it had arrived in a ziplock bag? Or tossed into an envelope and shipped haphazardly? Probably not. Like a single luxury purse arranged beautifully in a department store window—presentation was everything.
The same principles apply even when you’re selling a service and not a product. How do your services make your clients FEEL? Do they feel cared for and important? Or do they feel like all their time and energy choosing you was wasted on a service you sold as valuable and then just stuffed into a ziplock bag once you had their money?
So, to our future new clients, I hope our welcome boxes make you feel many things. I hope the client handbook answers the questions you have about what can be a complicated and frustrating process. I hope the card signed by Brian and his staff members (like me!) makes you feel like you’re in the right place. I promise there won’t be any rocks.