Creating Great Letterboxes

Know Your Audience

Every letterbox has a specific audience, even if the box was never planted with them in mind. By deciding who your audience will be before you hide the box, not only will you be able to ensure they enjoy themselves while hunting down your box, but you can warn others that the box may not be of interest to them. You don’t want people looking for your box if they’re not going to enjoy it!

But wait a minute, you might say, you’re hiding letterboxes for everyone to find and enjoy. Fair enough, but everyone has different tastes and interests, so such a box is doomed to fail. You’ll never be able to plant a letterbox that everyone will love, and you shouldn’t waste your time trying. Some people prefer longer hikes, while others prefer short ones that they can take their kids on, and you cannot create a single box that will make both groups of people happy. Some people like real mental puzzlers while others prefer straight-forward clues, and you won’t be able to make a single box that can make both groups of people happy. Strange as it may sound, the narrower your designated audience is, the more you can custom tailor it to maximize their enjoyment.

It’s like marketing. Figure out who your core audience is going to be, and build the letterbox with them in mind. Anyone else that goes out and enjoys your box is a nice bonus. The best run companies in the world use this method: Costco guns for the small businesses and large families. Wal-Mart guns for under-served suburbias of the world. 7-11 guns for those that want to get in and out—fast. Arco guns for those that will do anything to save two cents—even if it means waiting in line for 10 minutes before there’s an available pump. Figure out your audience, and then figure out how to make them happy with your letterbox.

Take Star Trek, for instance. There are some people that love Star Trek (*cough*Trekkie Gal*cough*). They live, breath, and talk Star Trek. They would actually fly to Iowa of all places just to see the future birthplace of Kirk. Now imagine they are your audience. What kind of letterbox would they drop everything and fly halfway across the country just to look for? Stamps with the Star Trek characters, for starters.

Creating a great Star Trek series is more than just hiding Star Trek themed stamps, however. Most of these people probably aren’t outdoorsy kind of people, so you have to choose a place that doesn’t require a lot of hiking to get to. If you can find a location that has somehow ties into Star Trek—such as the future birthplace of Kirk, a location where the TV show was filmed or the hometown of Lendard Nemroy—that would really be icing on the cake. Have the contents of the letterbox in a Star Trek lunch box. Your series will become a point of pride for these people. They won’t be able to sleep well at night knowing those boxes are out there!

Just because someone isn’t in your designated audience doesn’t mean they won’t have fun looking for the box. They can still enjoy the hike. Or the skill of your hand-carved stamps. Or the creative clues you wrote. Or even use it as an excuse to get out of the house. While these folks may not revere your series like it was holy, they’ll still enjoy it and appreciate your efforts for hiding it.

Your audience could be significantly more diverse than something like Star Trek fanatics. I enjoy hiding boxes for long-distance hikers. I like a good, tough hike in excess of ten miles, and I felt there was a severe lack of such boxes in the Portland area where I was living, so I took it upon myself to start creating them myself. I’ll admit, the boxes aren’t well-visited—perhaps one or two visitors per year. Most people do not fall into my intended audience of long-distance hikers, and that’s okay by me—the boxes weren’t meant for them. But those people who do enjoy long-distance hikes love those boxes because it’s exact what they want.

After hiding several letterboxes for long-distance hikers, I started to get complaints from short-distance hikers that wanted some of my stamps in their collection! They saw images of my stamps that others had gotten, and they wanted similar images but without the long-distance hikes. So I hid a few letterboxes on shorter hikes where my audience was specifically those people that wanted some of my stamps, but weren’t willing to hike long distances to get them.

What other sort of audiences can you choose for your letterbox? It could be fans of Lemony Snicket. Or maybe you have the beginner letterboxer in mind, anxious to plant their first letterbox, and you want to warn them about the Seven Sins of Letterboxing. Or film aficionados. Or a kids friendly series, probably planted near the best playground in town. Or for those who work in the airline industry. Hide an African Safari Series for those people desiring to visit Africa, or a Northern Exposure series for fans of said show.

You can pick your audience based on your hobbies, your industry of employment or for specific friends or family members. You can pick an audience of those who need a laugh or tourists passing through. I’ve planted the Clabber Girl box for those who like to bake, the Camelot box for those who would enjoy attending a Renaissance Festival and the Murder At Gabriel Park series for would-be detectives. I even planted the Crappy Stamp letterbox in honor of all those wonderful folks who plant crappy stamps. Use your imagination—but think of a specific audience, a specific type of person you want to find your letterbox, then plan everything about that box to do one thing: Impress those people. Knock their socks off!