HOW DO YOU COMPETE WHEN THE PRODUCT ALREADY EXISTS?
Skip bags were already on hardware-store shelves all over New Zealand, and customers trusted them. Purpose Bag took a share of that market anyway, by selling the part the shelf couldn't.
THIS MARKET WAS ALREADY SOMEONE ELSE'S.
Skip bags already existed. Proven for years, here and overseas.
Hardware stores sold them. Grab one off the shelf with your paint and timber.
Customers even had a name for them. "FlexiBin", the way Americans say Pampers instead of diapers.
When a competitor's brand name becomes the generic word for the product, most playbooks say the game is over. Demand was proven: big operators up in Auckland, a retail brand everyone recognised. All of that proof belonged to somebody else.
PurposeFill was a trusted waste-management company with a strong skip bin business. We watched this market from the outside and asked the obvious question: if the route is already tested, why aren't we on it?
THE THING WE WERE ACTUALLY LAUNCHING WAS A CHANNEL.
The bag itself was a commodity: woven polypropylene, three cubic metres, available from any supplier. What didn't exist was a way to buy one online with the collection already sorted. So the real job was never a landing page. It was convincing people to buy sight unseen from a company they'd never bought from, instead of picking the familiar bag off a shelf.
EVERY ADVANTAGE CAME WITH A "BUT"
The project never moved in a straight line. Each thing we had going for us exposed the next thing we didn't.
WHAT THEY WERE ACTUALLY SHOPPING FOR WAS CONFIDENCE.
The hardware store sells certainty: you see the bag, you touch it, you carry it home. Online we had none of that, so each part of the site had to stand in for it. The video stands in for handling the product, the reviews badge for the familiar brand, the waste guide for asking a shop assistant. After that the page order was obvious.
THE WHOLE STRATEGY FIT IN TWO LINES
The mental model we sold was pizza delivery. It arrives at your door, you fill it on your own schedule (a weekend on the hedge, a slow month on the garage), and when it's full we take it away. No hire clock ticking, no bin blocking the driveway, and it fits into tight spots and lifestyle blocks a skip truck can't reach. $199.99 all in, bag and collection together, while every competitor charged pickup as a second cost you found later.
FIVE DOUBTS. FIVE SCREENS.
The site is organised by uncertainty rather than by page type. Each screen retires one doubt standing between a first-time customer and the order button.
The homepage answers before you can ask. The demo video sits mid-fold, a real bag being filled by a real person, ringed by illustrations of the four-step loop. Above it, the order button and the Google-reviews badge side by side. Everything within three to five thumb-scrolls, because our ad traffic was almost all mobile.
The product page carries the specs (3m³, 750kg, dimensions) plus the brochure photography showing the bag in real use. Afterpay sits at product level, before the cart. For a first $200 purchase in an unfamiliar category, splitting the payment takes the edge off. One extra tab holds the fitting instructions, so nobody leaves the page to work out setup.
The collection page shows the crane truck lifting a full bag out of a driveway, the moment first-timers can't picture. Booking is a form, and pickup lands within days. We also collect competitors' bags. Every FlexiBin bought at a hardware store still needs a pickup, so their retail sale turns into our service job.
The most-asked question in waste removal gets its own illustrated page: acceptable, small amounts only, never. Each one with a picture instead of a paragraph. Answering it before purchase cut both the hesitation in the cart and the calls to the office.
Competitors' about pages were walls of grey text. Ours is video-led (the yard, the trucks, the team) and ends with the director's signature. When the purchase ends with a stranger's truck on your property, people want to know whose truck it is.
EVERY COMPETITOR WAS BORING. SO THE BAG GOT A PERSONALITY.
FlexiBin looked like packaging. We branded Purpose Bag like a character: grungy stencil type, black and gold, a bit of attitude.
The branding did double duty as distribution. A white bag with a bold black-and-gold stripe sits in a driveway for days while it's being filled. Every bag we delivered became a street-corner billboard with the collection number printed on the side, working the neighbourhood while the customer worked the garage.
The same system carried into everything physical I produced: the print run I negotiated with the supplier in China, the in-box brochure, the instruction sheet, the ad creative. A/B testing that creative, real driveways and real testimonials beat polished production every time. The grunge was the register the audience answered to.
THE DATA DISAGREED WITH US — AND WON.
Frontline feedback told us our buyer was a woman, 30–50, organising a home clean-up. We built the targeting around her.
Then the ad data came back: the strongest click-through rates were coming from men aged 35–55. Instead of arguing with the numbers, we ran both audiences in parallel with creative tuned to each. Overall campaign performance improved.
Small decision, and the one I still repeat back to people: your picture of the customer is a hypothesis. The channel tells you who actually walks through it.
FROM ZERO TO $273K+
Revenue growth (P&L verified) across four financial years. The final year flattens out as demand matured.
The question this story opened with: how do you compete when the product already exists?
