Today I received a Thank you parcel from FP containing a girl shirt in size M and three “post cards”.
I have no use for the shirt, so this goes directly into the trash bin. One card contains a reminder with the 349EUR discount which would be somewhat helpful for giving it to someone looking for a new phone. Card number two is the same thank you I already received by mail, also going directly into the trash bin and the third card is a request for input for the new 5 year plan.
Why didn’t FP just send out this last card? Everything else is - in my case - producing trash that was manufactured, shipped and directly binned (or for the shirt given to the Red Cross).
From a company that is so into fair and green production I would have expected some more thinking on how such resources could be put to better use.
From a community member I would have expected some more gratefulness.
I didn’t know that Fairphone is sending around t-shirts. You probably could have even sold it on the #market because t-shirts are something that others would happily receive: Fairphone T-shirts and more for the community?
Apart from that, the environmental impact of two paper cards is diminishing in comparison with the huge gains we draw from the modular design of the FP2. If you assume recycled paper, an LCA conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund found that the total greenhouse gases* accumulate to 1570 kg CO2e/t paper. A DIN A6 postcard (0.01554 m²) at 300 g/m² thus produces 4.662g * 0.00157kg/g = 0.00732 kg CO2e. According to the FP2 LCA report (PDF (1.6 MB), p. 37) conducted by Frauenhofer IZM, the FP2’s Global Warming Potential (GWP)* is 43.85 kg CO2e. Therefore, if Fairphone sends out 6,000 postcards, they roughly have the same impact on the environment as one FP2.
Now, every time you replace your battery instead of buying a completely new FP2, you save 93.7% of its GWP or about 5,614 postcards. Surely this justifies two thank-you postcards.
* I haven’t dug deeper into the exact methodology the two reports use to define “total greenhouse gases” and “Global Warming Potential”, but the latter seems to be defined more clearly.
From all I have read so far (elsewhere), this is a Thank you package to the Crowdloaners of 2018.
Given that many are inevitably receiving shirts in wrong sizes and/or sexes (M/W), I would encourage folks to engage in swaps, preferrably locally, but if there’s no other way, I’d not find a postal swap such a disaster either.
Or: From someone who eventually has a Fairphone I would have expected some more thinking about who might make better use of a probably too small shirt - instead of throwing it in the garbage.
Haven’t checked my mailbox for some time, so I don’t know whether I received anything in the past few days. Anyway, the Fairphone shirt I already had is actually a women’s shirt size M, and it fits pretty OK actually even though it’s not made for me, so I won’t have much to complain about.
I also got the useless marketing package (t-shirt, cholcate bar, postcards) which annoyed me a lot. It’s not only that it wastes resources, it also costs money - which I think they should rather invest in a fairphone 3 with a decent camera. It was a bad timing because Fairphone was bugging me about converting my loan to a share (most likely with the result that I’ll never get my money back). Since I don’t want my money wasted for marketing like this I’ll keep the loan as it is. Not really well played fairphone. I’ll donate the shirt or sell it via ebay.
Every company that wants to be successful (be it to make a lot of money or to affect changes in the world) has to do some kind of marketing and personally I think this is much better than what most other companies do.
Fairphone wasn’t bugging you, but informing you that now was the time to optionally convert your convertible loan. That this option would be available at some point was clear from the beginning - that’s why it was called a convertible loan.
Sometimes I have the feeling that marketing is the most important factor for success. So as an investor, I believe that the T-shirts are important. I am sure that everyone who doesn’t like the Fairphone T-shirt can find someone else who will proudly wear it.
I, too, received a shirt, chocolate and cards. I don’t object. The shirt was too small for me and my wife (aged 69) will not wear it. It will go to a charity shop and hopefully advertise Fairphone to a whole new customer base!
If you receive something of value for free, you can give it away or sell it. It might cost you some time or effort, but you will help someone else that way.
For me are the goodies of fairphone not helpfully or belong the to the destination of a better world.
Fail. It feels like cheap catching for sympathy.
I thought to convertible the loan. But now: No.
I was also irritated about the parcel. Lucky: the T-Shirt seems to be my size. But Fairphone does not know it - it seemed to be a guess. Asking me before would have been safer…
The parcel seemed to be sent by a marketing agency, because it is another city: Utrecht instead of Amsterdam.
I received a card, asking me what Fairphone should do in the next 5 years. Well the answer is quite clear. There are quite a lot of bugs still in Android 7. Most of them are not assigned to a programmer. Some of them are quite annoying, like not being able to disable a SIM-Card if using private/work SIMs. Please fix that.
My shirt doesn’t fit me, either. But I’m positive I’ll find someone who wants to wear it.
To put things into perspective: 1827 people took part in the crowdinvestment, so that’s the number of packages that were sent by Fairphone.
I’d assume the shirt was the biggest cost and the rest can be neglected.
Looking at the online store where I buy my fairtrade clothes, plain shirts sell around 12€ in B2C.
Let’s assume, 50% are retail margin and taxes.
So it cost Fairphone roughly 12,000€ (slightly more than 6 x 1827).
I don’t do advertising, so I have no idea what kind of Marketing the company would do with that amount of money otherwise. I found roughly 6,000€ for a one page color ad in one of Germany’s leading computing magazin c’t. That was 2014, i.e. 5 years ago.
So you would get 2 ads in one country (for the total of one month as c’t is issued bi-weekly). Or you can have 1827 people wear your shirt again and again and be there to talk about their enthusiasm.
Of course the investor sheet didn’t indicate how Fairphone intends to increase their marketing. But they clearly stated they were going to increase from 419,000€ in 2016 to
851,000€ in 2018 and 2,134,000€ in 2019.
