Bid for Bodoni was an April Fool Prank that Beard Design created. Ever since the company started, we’ve been doing pranks every April.

Bodoni (our dog) has in the last 1 year become one of the components of our brand identity.
Almost everyone who knows Beard Design also knows Bodoni, is familiar with her antics, has seen many pictures of her and knows how much we love her. Since the day she wandered into our office, in a half-dead condition, as a 2-3 week old puppy, we’ve shared stories, pictures and anecdotes about her on our Facebook Page, Website, etc… She’s probably more well-know than even the founder or any of the team members. So much so that at a recent event that we were speaking at, people would randomly come up to us and ask how Bodoni was doing.

What better way to fool people than to tell them that we’re selling Bodoni and inviting them to Bid for her!
We built an elaborate website, describing Bodoni, almost like the product page of a company: Features, Testimonials, Demo Video, etc… And we added a bidding mechanism that was wicked! Anyone interested has to enter their name and the bid amount. As soon as they pressed “Bid” a message would appear, telling them: “Sorry, Abhisek just outbid you! His bid is Rs.2466886. Try again, you fool! :-)”

*Abhisek is the founder of Beard Design and the one who changed Bodoni’s Diapers when she was young.

It worked! And how!
In just 2 days, hundreds of people bid for Bodoni, with amounts going into 10 digits! But we also got a lot of hate mail, messages on social media and even phone calls, telling us that we were really cruel to be putting up a dog for auction and building a website for it.

Funnily, we also got approached by a company that makes auctioning software, telling us that we should use their auctioning software on Bid for Bodoni  😀