This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Penny Pouch
Necessity is the mother of invention, especially for one Kansas Citian we will call Mr. Hardup. As layoffs have been sweeping through his Fortune 500 workplace (he won’t let us say which big local company that is, for reasons that will quickly become obvious), the place has begun to resemble the scene from the corporate-workplace-as-hell movie Office Space in which characters try to think up one marketable idea — like a Pet Rock — to help them effortlessly rake in their own riches.
During scary economic times, people need something to hold the pennies they’re pinching. Taking note of his wife’s purse, Hardup decided that today’s man needed something similar. A joke developed between them as the word purse became puss, both of which she had and he didn’t.
Driven by something Sigmund Freud might call vagina envy, Hardup created a squeeze-to-open coin purse that comes in two furry colors: Downtown Brown and Old Gray Puss. He calls it the CoinPuss. “Now nobody can snatch your money,” the product’s Web site (coinpuss.com) declares. “Except you.”
When potential customers run their mouses over an online picture of the hairy CoinPuss, the image responsively dilates just as the cursor arrow hits the spot.
Hardup takes his first entrepreneurial experiment fairly seriously. “I’m going to continue to pursue this,” he tells the Pitch. “It’s not as popular as the Pet Rock, obviously, but the Web site has been getting tons of hits.”
Hardup has told only a few coworkers about his side project, but he tells us that their “duck” hand sign has become an inside joke around the office.
Five weeks into this enterprise, he’s already learned a lot. He had imagined the CoinPuss would be popular with men, but as it turns out, “most of the people who have bought these so far have been women.”
Be patient, Mr. Hardup. Men can be down for that; it just takes some encouragement. Speak sweetly, but don’t let them have too much fun on your Web site. Nobody’s going to buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.
