The true story of the biggest mistake we made launching ghostwrite, and how we handled it.
By Josh Luber
When my wife and I started planning our wedding, someone told us: just know that something will go wrong. Two days before the wedding, everything was going perfectly according to plan… and then a blizzard hit the Northeast, where the majority of my family and guests lived1. Fortunately my parents and brother made it out the day before, but for everyone traveling on Thursday or Friday, ‘reindeer games’ was on. Not everyone made it, but many did. Some guests booked extra connecting flights to get around the storm; some suffered through agonizing layovers; and some simply refused to lose. One of my groomsmen took a train from Philly to Virginia and then flew to Atlanta; while my aunt and her family rented a minivan and drove twelve hours straight.
Collectively, we made it work and even though we’d obviously have preferred if the storm hadn’t punched us in the mouth, everyone came out the other side with a notch on their belt and a great story to boot.
We can now all say the same for the launch of my latest venture, ghostwrite.
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We started working on ghostwrite in October 2022 and spent a year on design and manufacturing. The first ghosts were made in September 2023 as gifts for our friends at Eastside Golf. They were used as tee box markers for their inaugural invitational golf tournament, and were then gifted to select attendees after the event.
Over the next year we made 40+ uniquely designed ghosts of varying populations and sizes. None were available for purchase. There would later be two friends and family releases but the overwhelming majority of ghosts that exist were gifts and or promotional items. This includes ghosts for Mike Amiri, Tiffany, SSENSE, Joe Freshgoods, Zero Bond, MSCHF, Landon Barker, Jackson Wang, adidas/CLOT, Lewis Hamilton, the NBA, the MLB and many more. You can check most of these (and more) on our archive page and Instagram account, but there are a few ghosts so rare that pictures don’t even exist (ahem, Homelander; ahem, Tyrone Biggums).
After a year of creating ghosts for our friends and family, building the brand, and developing manufacturing and packaging processes to get everything just right, we were finally ready to launch. Our first ghost, aptly named “One”, would be available for sale to the public in August 2024. However, it turned out that we only thought that everything was ready, because, as we would quickly find out, the packaging was about to punch us in the mouth.
Launching the company with a product release, it only made sense that the “One” was ghostwrite branded. The wordmark logo draped across the face like a set of eyes, and our ghost head logo on top of the crown with a number “1” inside it. The only other text is on the bottom of the feet: another logo on the left; the quantity produced on the right. The majority of the ghost is one single color, our company color: gray. It’s an intentionally blank gray, a canvas. The palette is purposefully neutral, humble, subdued. A medium more than a message. In all these ways, the design expressed the ethos of our brand: ghosts tell stories.
The point here: the product was RIGHT. The design was perfect.
The packaging, however, wasn’t.
In total, it was 22 months from concept to launch; almost two years of R&D. After design and manufacturing of the ghost itself, the single biggest challenge was packaging. Here’s why: As the first true collectible brand, everything that we do – every part of the product, every moment of the experience – is designed with intentionality and transparency for long-term value. And that meant our packaging had a higher order function than, perhaps, any collectible toy ever. ghostwrite packaging had to accomplish three critical functions, simultaneously:
- First, obviously, it had to meet our brand standards and just look cool;
- Second, of course, the packaging had to keep the ghost safe in transit (more on this below); and
- Finally, the true challenge was this: collectors had to be able to display their ghost while keeping it sealed in the original packaging. As we all know, sealed collectibles in pristine condition and original packaging are always worth more than ones that have been opened and or damaged. This is ‘Collectibles 101’. But for us, for 11” tall ghosts which are effectively art, what point would it be to remain unseen for eternity, sealed in an opaque box? It would be a tragedy to never see the stories that our ghosts tell. And so the only way to reconcile these two requirements was to design the packaging to be almost entirely clear. And herein lies all the work.
It was a herculean challenge, one that took way too much time and money, but one that we eventually met – and just in the nick of time. The final packaging was delivered to the factory just as the “One” ghosts were coming off the line. We thought the timing was perfect; in retrospect, it was too late.
If anyone other than me had been CEO – i.e., anyone who had ever made a consumer goods product before and would have known that you need to test-ship the packaging before sending it out into the wild – then that more experienced CEO would have surely delayed the “One” release to test the packaging and avoid the punch in the mouth I was about to take.
But not me. I had been working on ghostwrite for 22 months and it was time to ship! I mean, this is how startups work anyway, right? MVP – Minimum Viable Product. Ship product, get feedback, iterate, ship again.
Turns out there’s a pretty big difference between shipping code versus shipping toys.
Before we get to that difference, though, allow me to first pat the team on the back: the ghostwrite launch was a huge success. Truly. The Blind Dutch Auction (BDA) for the “One”, the press coverage, and our own internal marketing efforts far exceeded expectations. In the BDA, there were 219 total bids for the 20 ghosts available for purchase, resulting in a Clearing Price of $1,026. This was a great, first true indicator of market demand for ghosts.
The press coverage was equally as good, with articles from Bloomberg, CNBC, Complex, and Glossy, to name a few. All that was left to do was ship out our first official customer orders and bask in the glory of a job well done. I was already counting the IG posts we’d see. It’s true, I’d had a very clear, lifelong of warning about chickens and eggs and counting, but these were our first twenty customers; we knew they were fans; we knew they were friends.
There’s a thing about startups and their first customers. This is beyond the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle. This is about true day-zero shit. These are the people for whom your company exists.
The Airbnb founders talk about ‘doing things that don’t scale’ and tell stories of going door-to-door to meet many of their initial customers in person. Gary Vee replied to every single comment for the first five years. Fred Again held a private listening party for 150 of his day-one fans in a 77K+ capacity stadium. Every startup, if they’re lucky, has their first fans and their early adopters. At StockX it was a guy named Stephen Luigi Piazza who worked at Quicken Loans a couple floors down and bought more sneakers than anyone else during those first few weeks as we were trying to get the marketplace off the ground.
At ghostwrite we have that cohort of loyalists, too.
We watched this group come together, months before anyone could even buy a ghost. And when we ran the first Friends & Family release, they were there, ready to bid. When we finally launched and released the “One”, I could’ve guessed the names of a half-dozen winners before the auction ended – and I’d have been right. So when these folks did win the “One”, I was personally very excited for them. We were all excited that the twenty most important ghosts we would ever make would now sit in the homes of the people who supported us the most.
I knew exactly when the “One” orders shipped out. I expected some texts the day that they arrived. And sure, enough, at 3:16pm CT on August 30, one popped up from a familiar number. I opened it immediately, with joy. But a few words into the text, my heart dropped.
His “One” was damaged. The paint on the face of his ghost was scraped. Damn.
Surely this had to be a one-off issue. Just some incredibly bad luck caused by an avalanche falling on a UPS truck or something. But then we got an email. It came through the Customer Service inbox from a customer I didn’t know. Their “One” arrived with similar damage. DAMN.
Now it was a thing.
Our team of Carmen San Diego super sleuths went to work and we quickly found that it was, indeed, a systemic issue. DAMN DAMN.
It was a flaw in the packaging design. There was insufficient space between the ghost and the front of the box. It was causing the face of the ghost, primarily the nose, to rub up against the plastic in a way that damaged the surface of the figure.
“One” Damage, Exhibit 1
“One” Damage, Exhibit 2
Ordinarily, fixing packaging would be a minor thing, an expected part of product development – but now we were building the plane while flying it, and that created a few lose-lose decisions. First, and most importantly, we had to do right by the twenty “One” customers, although it wasn’t yet clear how exactly to do that. Second, and more urgently, we had two upcoming releases for which we were planning to use the same packaging. Rocky’s Matcha was scheduled to kickoff September 3th – i.e., four days from when we were – and Eastside Golf would follow two weeks after that. But those ghosts – particularly the ESG ghosts which would once again be used as tee box markers for their inaugural tournament – were needed by our partners on those specific days. So we ran the auctions, as planned, but delayed shipping the ghosts to the winners until we could fix the packaging. We were explicitly clear in the messaging for each release that the ghosts would ship late, and we maintained communication with the winners throughout the time – at one point even providing free ghostwrite merch for those interested – but at the end of the day it still took almost three months until we finally shipped our second and third public releases.
Rocky’s Matcha and Eastside Golf ghosts shipped on December 20th, 2024. They are both gloriously beautiful and spectacularly cool and tell very real, very clear stories. And it kills me that their owners had to wait months to experience that joy in person. But they are now sitting perfectly on shelves, displayed and sealed, the way they were intended to exist.
ghostwrite x Rocky’s Matcha “Latte” 400%
ghostwrite x Eastside Golf “Swingman” 400%
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Now, back to the twenty “One” customers. Rather than explain what we did, I’ll show you. Here are the most relevant excerpts from the email I sent on September 2, 2024.
What does this mean for you?
- Keep the ghost that you have. You don’t need to return it; just know that it’s technically defective and will likely get damaged if you ship it in the current packaging. The flip side is that those marks that start to appear on his face – those are now part of the initial design. You may be holding a Billy Ripken or Inverted Jenny or Rocket-Firing Boba Fett!
- Expect another. We will be sending you a NEW ghost with updated packaging ASAP. We’re still working through the exact details of the new ghost and packaging changes, but we will deliver something awesome (and defect-free).
- Don’t worry about scarcity. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that supply affects value, so we will design the new ghost with the intention and transparency to maximize the collectibility and long-term value of both. It may be a subtle variant of the original “One”; it may be something new; we haven’t decided yet. Regardless, you will end up with two different, equally beautiful ghosts.
- Don’t sell this One (at least not yet). In the meantime, please don’t resell your original “One”. Shipping it in the current packaging will cause damage. We’ll likely lock the StockX product page until the new ghosts have shipped and we can be sure the market recognizes and distinguishes them both.
In summary, you don’t need to do anything at all. We got ya.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We obviously wish this hadn’t occurred but I have a feeling that in the end, this is going to work out very well for you.
ghosts tell stories; imperfections often do, as well. Decades from now, that screwed up little ghost will be part of company lore . . . and you’ll own a piece of that, too.
Truth be told, we probably could have resolved this problem in a less dramatic fashion by simply replacing the few ghosts that were actually damaged (there have only been two reported so far). But as the first true collectible brand, everything that we do – every part of the product, every moment of the experience – is designed with intentionality and transparency for long-term value.
We are intentionally creating a collectible; therefore, condition matters. And we believe that transparency extends beyond the obvious – like sharing population numbers – and means we are open and honest about every part of the process, including (and especially!) our screw-ups.
I will continue to be in touch as we work on this situation in real time. It will likely take a few weeks, perhaps even a month or two, but I promise that we will all come out the other side in a much better place (and with more rare ghosts)!
That’s how we left it.
And so, immediately after pressing send on the email, our team went into overdrive to figure out exactly what and how we were going to make under the “Expect another” bullet. Added to the packaging fix, this meant we now had to pull off two extraordinary feats of manufacturing in much-shorter-than-usual timelines. As anyone who’s ever made a collectible toy can tell you, it’s usually about a year from concept to delivery. But you don’t need to be in the industry to understand that the one thing factories hate more than anything is “extraordinary feats of manufacturing in much-shorter-than-usual timelines.”
But we pulled it off.
I don’t want to compare us to the Cavs 3-1 comeback or the US beating the Soviets in ‘80 . . . because no one expected those guys to win. Day-zero collectible toy customers have much higher expectations than entire cities or countries. We weren’t allowed to fail.
And so on January 6, 2025 – four months and eight days after that fateful text – this was the scene at the ghostwrite shipping facility:
Here’s a better look:
And here is the story printed on the (new and improved) packaging:
ghosts tell stories
If necessity is the mother of invention, accidents and mistakes are the step-parents.
Jackson Pollock spills paint on the floor and ends up inventing abstract expressionism. James Pemberton, trying to make a morphine substitute, accidentally mixes coca leaves with carbonated water and creates Coca-Cola (original recipe).
The ghostwrite “One” debuted in August, 2024. It was beautiful – and beautifully flawed. It will forever exist in a state of patinaed damage, telling the story of our adolescent missteps. The ghostwrite “1A” – made exclusively for the original “One” collectors – is the redemption arc of this story: the part where we own our screw-ups and make good.
The story of the “1A” is the story of creation itself. Greatness is often born from error. Perfection only comes from mistakes. And some of the brightest creations only emerge from the darkness.
Kill the lights.
The official name for this 400% beauty is the ghostwrite “1A” – a nod to its position as successor to the “One”. But internally, we’ve been calling it the ghostwrite “GITD” or “Glow In The Dark” because…wait for it…it glows in the dark.
What better way to ring in 2025. Every ghost deserves to have their moment in the spotlight . . . and this one brought its own spotlight, sort of. Just turn off the lights and see for yourself.
Like the “One”, fifty “1A” ghosts were manufactured. One each for the twenty “One” customers, one each for the eleven ghostwrite team members and the rest to the archive. Maybe one or two will be gifted, maybe one or two will be displayed, but the one thing that is certain is that none will be available to purchase.
If you see a “1A” ghost in the wild, know that its owner is among rarefied air.
And if you see a “One” in the wild and its nose is smudged or its face resembles Harvey Dent’s, know that that’s how it’s supposed to look.
And should you find yourself with the equally rare opportunity to purchase either one, we don’t recommend you letting it pass by.
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Making things is hard. If you own a ghost, look at it. It took dozens of companies, hundreds of people, thousands of hours, tens of thousands of decisions over multiple years to make that. How crazy is that? How crazy is the fact that we even choose to attempt that? And so we expect some bumps and bruises along the way. We expect that to bring life to a new brand, a new consumer goods company, a new collectible, that we will make some mistakes.
Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed 1000 times, I have successfully discovered 1000 ways to not make a light bulb.” I like that. I like that a lot.
We’re not afraid to make mistakes. As we continue to make ghosts and we continue to make mistakes, we will continue to be honest with everyone when we make them, and how we’ll resolve them, and how we’ll get better from them. And if you have any suggestions or ideas or just want to help, go fuck yourself. No no no ! Sorry jk jk …that was a mistake, too. Sheesh. This mistake-honesty stuff is harder than you think 🙂
What I meant to say is, thank you.
ghosts tell stories.
And so, with the help of our first twenty customers and everyone else who has managed to read this far down, the “One” and “1A” tell the story of both the launch of ghostwrite, and how a company launches. And I hope that you are proud of both.
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration actually ranks Northeast snowstorms just like it ranks hurricanes. According to the Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale, March 15, 2007 was one of the worst storms of the past 70 years. ↩︎
ghostwrite 