Provo Craft Launches Cricut Gypsy on HSN

At Midnight on the 24th, Provo Craft went on HSN for what was described as the "worldwide launch" of the Gypsy.

The Gypsy has actually been available for pre-order at Michael's since August 15th. Those orders were supposedly available for pick-up on the 24th, and the Gypsy will be on Michael's shelves on October 4th. Other retailers will be able to start selling the product during the second week of November.

Provo Craft's Jinger Adams presented the Gypsy package, which was the limited deal of the day. The package's regular HSN price was listed as $349.95, but the day's introductory price was $299.95. The hosts kept pointing out that $299 was the MSRP for just the Gypsy and its accessory sleeve, and that when the machine comes to stores it will be a coupon-excluded item.

The package had an MSRP of $483.96 and included: the Gypsy, slipcase, HSN-exclusive carry case, various power, computer & cartridge connection cords, car charger, two full-content cartridges that are exclusive to the Gypsy, and the Don Juan cartridge that previously was only available on the Cricut Create machine.

Buzz about the Gypsy launch was all over the social media sites as midnight eastern approached on the evening of the 23rd. Scrapbookers on Facebook and Twitter were talking about their excitement about seeing the product demonstrated on-air, and about being able to buy one. On Twitter, at least, all this excitement had apparently unexpected effects for the company's PR efforts.

On Twitter, Provo Craft was directing people to a TweetChat room where all the tweets tagged with the hashtag "#gypsy" would show up to facilitate communication and create a community event even though all the attendees didn't follow each other on Twitter. So many Cricut fans were tweeting using the #gypsy hashtag, however, that the tag made the list of trending topics that appears on each Twitter user's profile page.

Experienced Twitterers can predict what happened next: spammers who didn't understand the meaning of the hashtag and thought it sounded possibly less family-friendly than it was started using the hashtag to get their messages seen by the people who were using searches and tag monitoring. And many of those spammers' profile pictures and tweets were NSFW (geek to english translation - Not Safe For Work: meaning containing adult content). Understandably, this didn't sit well with the online Cricut swarm (or should it be band of Gypsies?)

It didn't seem to completely derail the evening's festivities online but certainly put a damper on them for many participants. The frustrating thing was that most of the spam was coming from only a few accounts, and if Twitter were closer to "real time" in banning spammers the problem would have disappeared before it really disrupted the event.

After the midnight to 1am hour, Provo Craft's Twitterer said that they sold over half their available stock for the day in that first hour. After several more scrapbooking segments in the next 12 hours that featured the Gypsy package, the noon hour segment began with the announcement to viewers that there were only 680 units remaining. The package was sold out by 12:40pm.

By my count, the HSN event makes the fifth "debut party" for the Gypsy. There were 3 such events the week of CHA-Summer - the online unveiling, the evening invitation-only Gypsy Gala in Orlando, and then the unveiling in the booth the following day. Then there was the buzz the day that pre-orders started to be accepted at Michaels stores, and now this HSN event. There will be a couple more big days in this promotional schedule too, when they Gypsy arrives on Michaels store shelves and is released for general sale. You have to hand it to Provo Craft. They certainly know how to build buzz around an item and sustain it for awhile. Other than the misstep early in the campaign when the response to questions that arose over how the device worked were somewhat bungled, this marketing program has to be judged a textbook example.

People are talking about the Gypsy, and initial demand was good for the item. The question is will that demand for a high ticket item be able to be sustained leading into the holiday season in a poor economy? The answer to that will be of interest to many companies in the industry beside just Provo Craft, because it has far-ranging implications.