By TONI DIANE BELLEN
CHINGGAY Nuque didn’t think a reply to an old friend’s text message would change her life.
But it did. And five years later, Carmen Angela “Chinggay” Nuque, Antoinette Jadaone and their company, Witty Will Save the World Co., have navigated beyond their brainchild, “The Anti-Coffeehouse Planner,” to “slumbooks” (yes, they still exist), wedding planers, and now calendars and greeting cards sold in mainstream shops like Fully Booked.
How many planners speak Filipino? Well, Witty Will Save the World’s do. Their latest offering, “The ‘Relaks, Puso Lang ‘Yan, Malayo sa Bituka’ Planner 2015,” is no different, replete with Filipino wit and humor that are the company’s trademark.
Witty Will Save the World owes its success to Jadaone’s creativity, Nuque’s business acumen and what Nuque says is their simple game plan: to not have a game plan. Just the way the two film graduates of the University of the Philippines without a shred of business background started out when they became business partners in 2009.
“It really was Tonet’s idea in the first place,” the 29-year-old Nuque said, referring to the 30-year-old Jadaone.
Jadaone, then working as a production assistant, came up with Witty Will Save the World Co. as a break from the hustle and bustle of the world of film. (Jadaone is now a successful writer-director with a string of hits to her name: “English Only, Please”; “Beauty in a Bottle”; “Relaks, It’s Just Pag-ibig”; and “That Thing Called Tadhana.”)
“She (Jadaone) texted three friends and I was the only one who replied, who said: ‘Okay, let’s do this,’” Nuque said. “She’s creative; I wasn’t at all.”
Nuque was doing marketing for 7 Eleven at the time. Unlike Jadaone, she never got into the film industry, having long known she didn’t have the passion for it, even when she was in film school. In fact, she tried to “forget about film entirely” after college.
“The bulk of it (film) is production, and it takes more than 24 hours and you don’t take a bath,” she said. “Sorry, ‘di ko talaga kaya. Gusto ko talaga mag-toothbrush, maligo sa oras (Sorry, I really can’t take that. I really want to brush my teeth and shower on time).”
The two former classmates started with 500 copies of their first planner, “The ‘I was supposed to get that coffeehouse planner but I got fat/broke on the 10th frappe’ Planner 2010,” more popularly known as “The Anti-Coffeehouse Planner.”
Nuque didn’t immediately give up her job after signing on to Witty Will Save the World. Making money, after all, was the farthest thing from her mind, as well as Jadaone’s.
“We started with no money at all. We wanted to only release something when we actually thought of something, so it wasn’t really going to be about money,” Nuque said.
It was only after they sold around 3,500 copies of the planner through word of mouth that Nuque eventually quit her job and worked on Witty Will Save the World full time.
Their business has become a phenomenon, both online and in mainstream shops.
Aside from Fully Booked, Nuque and Jadaone have partnered with Bratpack, The Invitation House, Quirks, Handog and Mt. Cloud Bookshop, which carry a range of their products. The yearly planner remains their flagship product.
Nuque does almost everything herself for the business side of Witty Will Save the World, which operates out of her house in Pasig.
“I literally lift and carry the stocks,” she said. “We don’t have staff or an office. The artists just draw (online). I write the waybills (for shipping), I drive.” Nuque also personally collects invoices and payments from their distributors.
Witty Will Save the World used to earn so little that Nuque would tell Jadaone, “Uy, naka-ganto tayo, hati tayo (Hey, we made this much, let’s split it up).”
Nuque is most proud of having come up with a system that tracks sales from their different outlets and having stabilized the company’s cash flow. These days, she and Jadaone get a certain percentage of their earnings every month.
As owners, Nuque and Jadaone have had their share of dealing with unreliable suppliers and a temperamental artist.
Their first two suppliers printed pages upside down. Twice for their 2013 planner, they had to announce to prepaid customers that the planner was delayed.
Then the artist who had been doing the planners quit on Nuque and Jadaone last year, forcing the duo to scrounge around for his replacement: They found three who put the 2014 planner together. This year, five artists worked on “The ‘Relaks, Puso Lang ‘Yan, Malayo sa Bituka’ Planner 2015.”
Like all Witty Will Save the World’s planners, the design and content of the 2015 planner don’t follow any templates.
“This one sells itself because there’s nothing else like it,” Nuque said. “You can’t sell anything if you’re just like everybody else.”
As for the coffeehouse that helped kickstart Witty Will Save the World, Nuque said, “We still go (there). We just don’t buy the planner. We don’t intend to.”
*Product photos sourced with permission from Witty Will Save the World’s Facebook page–Ed.
(The writer is a journalism student at the University of the Philippines-Diliman who submitted this story to her Journ 101–Introduction to Journalism–class under VERA Files trustee Yvonne T. Chua.)