MINI HOTEL BOX - THE BEGINNING
As the proud owners of Mini Hotel Box, we are also two entrepreneurs (also husband and wife) who happen to travel a lot and have stayed in many hotels. So, it’s rare for us to distinguish between hotels but one in particular stood out for us.
How It All Started
Our Mini Hotel Box concept started with a normal business trip to New York. We arrived at the boutique hotel and began settling into our room. Then, we saw something next to the minibar, that contained various items, should we decide to have an extra romantic night during our stay! What a great idea! Being entrepreneurs for the last 30 years, we began to discuss the concept behind this product. We agreed that when guests stay in a hotel, there are a number of things that they really need or appreciate hotels providing during their stay. We bizarre that the hospitality industry didn't really fill that need? We immediately started brainstorming which other products guests needed the most during a hotel stay. We documented our ideas and put them aside so we could continued with our New York trip as planned.
Initial Concept to Product Creation
On our return home, we sat and reviewed our list of ideas to decide which projects were worth taking forward during Spring 2020. One idea was the hotel products we had outlined during our stay in New York. We agreed that the idea was worth pursuing. As guests, we want hotels to exceed our expectations, even the smallest things can do that. As hotel owners, you want happy guests, as well as increased revenue during their hotel stay.
We decided that we really wanted to do this right. We started producing a list of things we thought we’d love any hotel to offer during our stay. We then chose the name Mini Box to play with the association with the Mini Bar and following our trip to New York, we immediately decided to name our first product 'Mini Love Box'. We then spent time curating an assortment of things to go into the Mini Love Box that we felt happy with and thought others would appreciate.
After looking at the assortment and our market, we soon realised that we needed to provide the Mini Love Box in different ranges according to price points to offer more flexibility to buyers. We decided on a basic kit that is simple and straight forward, a medium range box and a luxury range box. We then moved on to working on the graphic profile and packaging, which is the end product you see today.
At the same time, we recognised that releasing just one product in three variations could be difficult, especially as we needed our salespeople to have more options to offer potential clients. So we decided to produce a list of different products and ranges that we thought would be perfect for the hospitality industry.
To be continued...