WonderfulGraffiti

A Quote From A Muffin Book

Being a writer, I've always been more comfortable with words than pictures.
But I've been looking at so  many blogs lately and discovered that the most interesting ones have photos.
So I finally committed to learning how to insert photos. You now get photos. Not all the time. Just when I have time.

I came upon a great Herman Melville (Moby Dick) quote yesterday in this book of muffin recipes from Gooseberry Patch. (See image below. Ta-Da!) This book is illustrated by a former creative director at Bath & Body Works. We moved to Columbus when she hired me. She left soon after to spend more time being a mom, and did freelance illustration for lots of Gooseberry books.

I'm pretty sure she freehanded the type, which suits Gooseberry's image of "handcrafted" so well. If or when we design something around this quote for ourselves, we won't copy Dana's typestyle. But I am going to steal the quote.

Fun With Family At Work

 My dad is off today to visit three of my siblings in New York. He'll be gone three weeks. Let me say now, the production area will go to hell while he's gone. He's absolutely amazing. Oh, annoying, too. But the floors are swept, trash is out, supplies are stocked. He works very deliberately to make sure we maintain quality control and minimize our expenses. (He believes a large part of our future corporate strategy should be turning the lights off in the packing room when it's not being used. Which is annoying because it almost always is.)

We're not hiring any time soon but my dad is already talking about it. "I want to work with the new people, and we're not just going to just throw them into the job without properly training them."

Ryder came in today to work until noon. He needs money to pay for driving class. Plus we're making him because we insist he be productive. Okay, I do.

He had me in stitches. He put his favorite music (indie) on the sound system and turned up the volume. I liked it! I get so tired of the same stuff every day. He did a few chores he called "busy work." Then he wanted to learn how to pack PBK orders (you can figure out what the PBK means; I'm not allowed to tell.) He didn't want to mess up on the packing process, so he wrote every step on his hand. As he got to the last step, he said, "Good. Because I'm running out of  hand." M.

The Joys Of Working On A Clean Computer

I was talking with a woman who has participated in the Athena Award process, and I mentioned that I had an interview with the other three applicants. She said I had it wrong. She said the four of us had been selected from all the other applicants. We’re the finalists.
I said oh.

Here’s what I’ve done to prepare for my interview.

I gathered sales history charts for the last four years. One needs a visual aid.

I MapQuested the interview location so I don’t get lost.

Geord and I put together a 30-second photo piece that quickly shows our range; Wonderful Graffiti, Blank Canvas, Graffiti 3D, and Wedding, including the Black Tie and Chocolate collections.

I decided what to wear. I plucked my eyebrows.

Spoke today with the woman who won last year’s award. She gave me some good advice, I think. She said, “I can’t tell you what to say. I can only tell you what my interview was like.” Fair enough.

The interview coordinator suggested I give the tech manager at the interview facility a call to see if our tech needs could be met there. I made Geord make the call. The tech manager didn’t return his call. He’s not worried. He’ll go with me to make sure my laptop hooks up with their screen, etc. Then he has to leave. It’s my interview.

I decided that if I was going to bring my laptop to the interview, I had better clean it.
Clean it, you say? One time, when I was working full-time as a freelance writer, another writer and I were talking on the phone and I mentioned I was so bored I was cleaning between my computer keys with a Q-tip. She said, “I never knew anyone who cleaned their keyboards!” Obviously she doesn’t lend her keyboard to a grubby son. Who eats snacks while using said keyboard. And never washes his hands after eating said snacks.

Just like when you have 24-hours’ notice to show your house to unsolicited homebuyers and you go crazy painting and cleaning and your house feels completely new? Same thing with a laptop. I recommend Q-tips.

We Can See The End From Here. Sort Of.

The startup process with our new big partner may be coming to an end soon. We should be getting our Spanish translations back in the next day or so. We add the Spanish to layouts, send the layouts back to the translation company for their final blessing, then send everything back to the partner for their final blessing. (Final submission must include a photo of the marketing as it will appear in the store, images of each piece of marketing, a translation code and the submission form.)

Then we can start printing and collating and shipping stuff to 125 test stores. M.

Happy, Shiny People Blogging

And here’s yet another thing I find awkward about company blogs. You can never blog or twitter about anything awful. Everyone–at least the business people I follow–write things like, “Got another giant order today. Love being busy!” Or “Off to the New York gift show!” No one ever writes, “Shit, we lost our biggest account today.” Or “Struggling to make payroll. Looking under sofa cushions.”

No one wants to do business with people who don’t appear successful. So I know that a lot of business blogging is superficial. I know there’s another half of those companies' stories they’re not revealing.

Wouldn’t you like to know what we’re not revealing? M.

Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork

Boy, who wants to read a blog entry with a title like that?

Today was all about forms. One of our partners is adding our wedding collections to their site, so we had to assemble lots of info to put into spreadsheets. I'd rather have my eyeballs torn out of their sockets.

Geord and I had to go downtown to sign a bunch of papers, like as many as when you buy a house. Got to practice my penmanship. My signature got neater with each one, Geord's got messier. He takes pride in making his signature as messy as possible. Like his office.

Our BIG new partner bounced back our signage today because they felt it needed a period. I say it's a design thing, not a grammar thing, but they can have whatever they want. They're our BIG partner.

My dad also convinced us that we need to do a color chart for the BIG partner, to go with the order form. With actual samples of actual Graffiti. I had wanted to do a working sample of each color, but I can imagine how bedraggled the sample would get after much handling. So we had to get the color chart designed and will submit that for management approval along with the sign that has the new period. THAT will have to go through their Spanish translation process as well. Then we''ll have to make the color charts. By hand. It's going to be a lot of work putting those Graffiti squares on those color charts, but as my dad says, "Whatever we can do to make the sale right then and there." And that's the way we roll.

Friends and family, great news! Mackenzie got work today that she was selected to be Assistant Stage Manager for a Columbus production of RENT. It's her all-time favorite musical. They called today and wanted her to start tonight. But we celebrated Ryder's last day of school with a trip to Buffalo Wild Wings. Because he's officially a sophomore in high school. Makes me happy/sad. M.

How Our Custom Canvases Evolved

I've always wanted to carry our concept of "interior typography" further than vinyl letters that stick on walls. That's why we introduced Blank Canvas™ and Graffiti 3D™ as soon as we could.

Back then, I thought that because what we were doing was so novel, it would appeal to trendy, contemporary, loft-living people with lots of blank wall space. The look of our earliest Graffiti designs reflected that thinking.

When we introduced Blank Canvas, I was still in that mode. So I worked with the designers to come up with black-on-white, very type-dominate canvases. The first call I got after we launched Blank Canvas was from an interior designer who asked if she could get a cream background instead of the stark white, I knew I'd biffed.

Not long after Michael, one of our designers, started working for us, he began creating canvases that looked very different from most of the canvases shown on our site. He gradually got more and more excited about a technique that layered lots of aged papers and washes and inks to get a really time-worn, romantic looks. When someone requested a custom design, one of the first options he would offer was one of his "parchment" pieces. Those were the ones clients chose, over and over. He's done lots of wedding vows in that style, lots of poetry, even an Obama quote which ended up being one of Michael's most beautiful original designs to date.

We're starting to promote Michael's look. We sent an email out to our fans a few days ago. Michael said he just received a request from a client who wanted a canvas larger than those we offer. She ended up going with three canvases, one stacked on top of each other. Brilliant.

I love standing back and watching our work evolve. M.

What's Weisure?

This on CNN.com today: http://tinyurl.com/poas72

It's no surprise that people worked differently fifty years ago. They went to work, they came home and the two places remain separate. Today we blend home and work 24/7. It's supposedly called "weisure." A name I love as much as "staycations" and "baby bumps."

One would think, as an entrepreneur and small business owner, my two spheres would smush together completely, but they don't. We work long hours, but when we're at work, we're at work. When we're away from work, we're away from work. It's our survival mode. If we didn't tune out, we'd burn out and cry.

Okay, we talk about work issues at home, but we're trying more and more not to. The kids especially hate it when we discuss the business. They know what's their time and they protect it.

According to the article, we're either 50 years behind the times or 50 years ahead. M.