Our Story
Hi I'm Phil Hayes-St Clair.
I'm a girl dad, serial entrepreneur and educator.
I'm thrilled to share how Be In Motion came to life and I while I love our mission, I hope it inspires you to act on the hunch that's living in the back of your mind. I did, without much data, and here we are.
The best way to start this story is to explain that there is an indescribable joy that comes when hospital patients receive flowers. I witnessed this repeatedly as I spent more time in hospitals with my work. And this simple gesture, of sending flowers to someone in the often unnerving surrounds of a hospital ward, inspired me to create Be In Motion.
At the heart of what I was seeing was the delivery of unexpected encouragement.
I kept noticing a 30-second window of palpable expectation building inside the patient’s mind when flowers arrived. It started when they realised a flower delivery was for them and the crescendo came when they learned of the sender.
The look on their face at that moment is often a mixture of three emotions: Gratitude, happiness and disbelief.
That someone you know would go to the effort to brighten your day given their busy life is unexpected and, unfortunately, far from regular.
My hunch was that those 30 seconds of growing excitement and expectation made that experience memorable and helped patients stay positive and in some way, improve their resilience.
My mind quickly turned to how this experience could be made available to people everywhere. So I decided to create a digital equivalent based on the flower delivery experience. Little did I know that what I would create was 'Chapter 1'.
Chapter 1 - It’s all in the name
The name, Be In Motion, hails from the belief that to improve any situation, you need to avoid standing still. In other words, you create an advantage for yourself by being in motion. And, sometimes all it takes is some unexpected encouragement.
With no technical expertise but a clear vision for how I wanted people to feel, both as a sender and as a recipient of this unexpected encouragement, I created an online store on Shopify, hired a freelance software developer and within one week, an experience was born.
For $10 you could go to our store and leave a message for someone who needed some encouragement. We took that message and sent it as a special hand written card.
Each card was sent using old school mail and when the friend, family member or colleague received it, they don’t know the identify of the sender until they scanned the QR code on the card. When they did, the senders name was revealed, confetti (🎊) filled the recipients screen and we let the sender know that they had just made someone's day!
The best part is that the recipient is then nudged to send their own Be In Motion card, and thanks to that network effect, the movement grows!
I’m happy with how this hunch played out.
What I didn’t see coming was that 20 world-class leaders would join as Be In Motion Ambassadors. I also didn’t expect orders to come from multiple countries. I also wouldn’t have thought that companies would send encouragement via my little experience to their teams during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
And that's the end of Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 - Stepping up
The good news is Chapter 2 is here! We have stepped up the encouragement game with beautiful apparel, support for the incredible team at Orygen and our Be In Motion cards now come free with anything you buy on our store.
Now I hope you do join us, my encouragement is that you can build products like Be In Motion too.
Curiosity, tweaking an existed experience, calling in some friends to help (including my good friend Aaron Roberts) and obsessively prototyping with a very small budget can deliver the unexpected.
And if you’re interested, this e-commerce product is profitable for four reasons.
- The cost of goods is predictably low.
- The postage cost is fully optimised to be the lowest possible.
- Each experience is designed to be shared on social media (and we ask recipients to share it!)
- The built-in network effect is free (because we ask recipients to pay it forward)
Thanks again for being here and if you're interested in partnering with us, please contact us here!
Founder, #beinmotion
