Dlint tried to keep his jubilation under check while he unloaded and unlocked the haven unit while the man scrounged up crumpled notes of leenar notes from within a little safe inside his hut, putting together about a thousand leenars while Dlint lifted the haven unit from the chained line of products, handing it over to the small family.
"Thank you for your support," Dlint smiled uncharacteristically, accepting the payment and returning a coin in exchange. "Hope the haven unit is to your satisfaction."
"Hmph, so do we," the man grumbled lightly as he watched his children squeal in excitement, playing about with the exotic little box that was to serve as their home for the night.
By the time Dlint turned around, several more people were gathered around the line of haven units.
Older men and women who inspected the strange products with a truly mystified expression.
Many had never seen anything like it.
Even those who had been even more surprised by the fact that they could afford it, even if it was quite costly by slum standards.
"This feels sooo good~" the little girl Miria groaned with comfort as she rolled around inside on the comfy and soft internal bed.
"It's so cool!" the young boy exclaimed with an innocent delight as he climbed on top of the little haven unit.
The sight tipped the balance for some of the men and women who were on the fence regarding the purchase.
"I'd like to purchase one for my children as well," one man insisted. "Will it be able to fit three young children inside?"
Dlint's expression grew complicated. "I think that will be very congested, if possible. Why don't I show all of you what it looks like on the inside?"
It wasn't long before Dlint had unlocked another product for demonstration, showing them what it was like.
"That bedding…" one woman exclaimed. "It's softer and cleaner than anything you will find in the landfills!"
"I'd like to buy one as well!"
"Our hut collapsed yesterday, please give us two."
Within half an hour, all seven of the Haven products of this particular team were sold.
"…Is that all you had?" one man frowned. "I was considering purchasing one as well."
A few others in the gathered crowd nodded while the others simply restricted themselves to a curious gaze.
"Then, you can place an order and we will be able to supply them to you," Dlint remarked, pulling out a notepad. "If enough people want it, then we will eventually be able to set up a base here in the slums. For now, we will have to depart."
He quickly took notes of the people who wished to formally place an order for a haven unit, often not for themselves but for their children, a severely ill family member, or for an elderly person who simply couldn't endure the heavy storms.
The monsoons saw many a death, not just due to housing collapse, but simply because they weren't equipped to handle the many other things that the technological sophistication of the inner city had erased as problems.
RUMBLE…
Dlint's gaze hardened as his attention shifted upward to behold the dark clouds that had long swallowed the skies and the light of the Sun. Flashes of lightning were followed by ominous roars of thunder.
"It's time to leave," Dlint remarked with a knowing expression, glancing at his magiphone. "The truck will be here on rebound soon."
He turned one last time, directing a sweeping gaze at people in the locality exploring their new haven units with fascinated curiosity. A small smile emerged on his face before the three of them departed from the slums in a hurry, eager to get back to the city before the storms came.
The first sales operation had been a perfect success.
They weren't the only ones who had succeeded with selling their batch of units. All three hundred and twenty-eight hundred units had been sold across forty-eight districts of the slums.
Back in the company headquarters, Cæ, Feidin, and Seliphaz had long gotten the news of all the recorded sales from each of the groups dispatched across the forty-eight districts of Trinity Housings.
"Our entire inventory was sold in less than an hour once they actually began their sales operations," Feidin remarked with an excited expression. "On top of that, they got more than five hundred orders for more haven units already!"
His smile was delighted as he leaned in, skimming through the tabulated numbers compiled from the various reports from their sales teams. "This is a very promising response for our very first sales campaign. It means that your rationales and your market research were on point, Cæ! If it wasn't, we would have definitely gotten a much more lukewarm and lackluster response from the people of the slums. But we sold out on the very first go."
Seliphaz's expression lit up with ecstasy. "After all that time and effort spent designing and testing out different prototypes for the haven unit, we have finally gotten to the stage of making sales."
A small smile cracked at the edge of Cæ's mouth. "This is just the beginning. The fact that we have five hundred orders placed is very promising, considering that we just started our advertisement campaign a little over a week ago. It means that the value proposition of the haven is clear enough that there is a subset of people who will immediately buy it."
Once the product proliferated more and more within the innermost layer of the slums, an ever-increasing number of people in the slums would purchase it, the more they saw it around them.
After all, one of the biggest impediments to getting people in the slums to purchase anything was the value proposition and trust. The latter would become easier to instill when they saw it becoming more and more of a staple in the slums.
"You were right about another thing," Feidin remarked with a knowing tone. "You were right in that we would require contracting with a manufacturing company to handle the burst in demand. We cannot manufacture five hundred units in a short amount of time. And by the time we do, the hype may very well have passed. Thankfully, thanks to your recommendation, I am already in talks with some contract manufacturers who have expressed a surprising degree of interest in our products."
Seliphaz smiled with a knowing expression. "It's because the risk associated with the product of the haven units isn't very high. The haven design doesn't have enchantments to it, making it so that they don't need to use an enchantifier machine in the production process, drastically reducing the cost of production."
Cæ nodded. "In addition to that, the size of the product means that the losses made with each individual product are low. If the business tanks, then they will be able to minimize losses by reducing the amount of resources they waste."
After all, one extra haven unit wasn't a big deal, but if they made an extra unit of something much larger and much more expensive, then the losses would be much heavier. Many contract manufacturers were most interested in low-risk, smaller products with a lower risk margin.
"Among all potential partnership agreements, this is the contract manufacturer that is most eager to contract with us," Feidin remarked, clicking on several tabs with his mouse before the image of a large factory spanning many meters along its length and width emerged on the screen before him.
[Marshall's Manufacturing Co. Pvt Ltd.]
The entire factory had a steely aesthetic with walls and a roof entirely comprised of a dark gray color. The image featured a robust exhaust and ventilation system atop its roof, with an equally large storage warehouse situated right opposite it for the inventory of immediately completed products.
Cæ couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer size of the factory. "How many production lines does it even have in the first place?"
"About a hundred and twenty," Feidin muttered with a glint of disbelief himself.
"…What?!" Cæ's stoic expression cracked with visible surprise. "How in the world did you manage to broker a deal with a company with such a big factory?"
"Well, the deal isn't set yet," Feidin remarked with a pointed tone. "There are some materials in the haven unit input raw materials that the factory doesn't have supply chains for, so they are looking to explore any easy options for it. Also…"
He turned to Cæ with a measured gaze. "…The owner-CEO wants to speak with you."
Cæ raised an eyebrow. "Me in particular?"
"Yes, I'm not sure why, but he requested to meet with the CEO."
Cæ knitted his eyebrows with an intrigued expression. "…Alright. I don't mind meeting with him if he can make the deal go through faster."
With a hundred and twenty production lines, they could pump hundreds of haven units per model.
"Of course," Feidin winced. "We will have to split profits. Need I remind you that our profit margins are already razor thin by the standards of manufacturing businesses? We will need to divide that in half, doubling the number of the units sold per month needed to break even at about one thousand and six hundred haven units."
Cæ shook his head. "I don't mind. It's worth it. Frankly…"
A glint of excitement flickered in the depths of his gray eyes. "I didn't expect that all three hundred and twenty-eight products in our inventory would sell out. I was expecting eighty to ninety percent sales on our first day. But the fact that they managed to fully sell out and also register around five hundred extra orders is truly beyond what I expected. It seems that even I may have underestimated how intense the demand for safe, effective, and comfortable housing is."
It made Cæ all the more invested and willing to go all out to ensure that the project was a whopping success. While a slow start was not a bad sign, a great start was definitely a sign of brilliance.
"Who is the CEO of Marshall's Manufacturing?" His eyes sharpened with determination.
"He's an old man called Leland Gorsworth," Feidin remarked. "He spends most of his time in the factory since I last visited him, so you can drop by any time as long as you give him some notice ahead of time."
Cæ nodded with a serious expression. "I will be sure to do that. Is there a reason why this man is eager to partner with us specifically?"
"Funny you should ask, because I think there is," Feidin remarked as he ventured to the website of the contract manufacturer, where the production lines were detailed. "…Notice any oddities?"
Cæ frowned as he studied the list of production machines the factory was equipped with. "Fabricators, forges, alchemizers… wait, they don't have any enchantifiers?"
Enchantifiers were among the most crucial modern manufacturing machines that applied enchantments to products, allowing them to have pronounced magical effects that directly consume magical energy, requiring a constant input.
It was precisely the thing that Cæ had avoided to make sure that people in the slums could actually afford his product and wouldn't need to continuously purchase expensive magicells.
"However, enchantment technology is the very foundation of an overwhelming majority of modern magitechnology," Cæ frowned. "What kind of manufacturing company doesn't have enchantifiers? It's basic bread and butter. There are manufacturing companies that have nothing but enchantifiers."
Feidin nodded with an equally mystified expression. "To be honest, I haven't the faintest idea why they don't have enchantifiers in their production line and don't manufacture enchanted products. They exclusively choose to manufacture products that have no enchantments in them. For example…"
He turned to Seliphaz, "…our haven products."
Seliphaz's eyes lit up. "I have a feeling I will get along with him. He must really like simple products. "
"Or hate enchantments," Cæ remarked. "Set up a meeting tomorrow, I want to get this deal done as soon as possible."
-