Hiatus

I take this break from my hiatus to formally anounce my hiatus.  For those who don’t know, which I would imagine is the bulk of you, in addition to leaving PDA I’m in the process of moving.  I’m not sure how long the “process” takes, but I’m in my new house and have 95% of unpacking left.

I hope to resume posting within the next week or so, as there’s only a 2 week break between my two jobs.  In the meantime, I’ll be secretly hiding in the bushes as I read your continued posts and I’ll be adding to my Last.fm profile.  :-)

If you haven’t already, take this time to add my feed to your reader, so you will be alerted automagically when I return!

Saying Goodbye

Next Wednesday, April 30th is my last day at Progressive Design Apparel.  I submitted my letter of resignation and have been wrapping up my business.  One of the main things I wanted to do was continue to train our new addition.  I’ve also started saying my goodbyes.  I’ve been with PDA for 10 months and it’s amazing how many people can touch your life in that short period of time.

As a teacher, 10 months would be enough time to make a world of difference.  There’s something special about bringing in kids and watching them grow in front of your eyes.  In 10 months at PDA, I’ve not seen as much personal growth, but I have seen a lot of relationships form, change, and even end.  Ten months is a rather short life cycle, but the beauty of short life cycles is they’re easily observed.  And now I have to say goodbye.

I already sent an email to my biggest client.  She’s just a sweetheart to work with.  I’ll miss the fact that no matter what craziness happens, I could get the job done and make her happy.  She’d probably be embarrassed to know how much I like working with her.  And I’d be embarrassed for her to know, too.  But how often do you get a huge client that’s also your nicest client?

I emailed the one client who seems I can never make happy; also a big client.  I walked in 10 months ago picking up the pieces of someone else’s mistakes and couldn’t ever get on this client’s good side.  I bent over backwards the way none of my colleagues could or would have and still couldn’t make her happy.  Of course, I’ve never let on to her that she’s the only person I can’t please, so I did the respectable thing and sent her an email of my departure.  I was sure to include a line about how much I enjoyed working with her.

Although, it’s not the same as saying goodbye to my kids, it’s still hard to say goodbye.  Where will my clients end up down the road?  Will they be taken care of?  Will I ever again cross paths with them? 

I’ll likely never know the answers to those questions, but right now I’ve got bigger questions on my mind.  Where will I be in a year?  Will I be a success?  Will I be happy?  I’m excited about moving forward and growing, but there’s always that uncertainly before embarking on something new.  But you know what?  No one ever found the next great thing in life by staying in the same place.  I have to get out there and explore the world and discover things for myself.  I have the best support system I need, a great wife and a couple of pups who don’t care what I do as long as it involves petting them.

I haven’t decided what to do with this blog yet.  I’ve been doing it for a couple months now, so I’m starting to get decent traffic.  At the same time, I’m going to be less marketing and more sales in my next position.  So my options are ditch this blog, start a new blog more about me personally, start a new blog more about me professionally (like this one), or drop blogging altogether.  I generally say give the people what they want; problem is, I don’t know what you guys want.  I’ll let you know what I come up with, but if you have any suggestions please let me know. 

Know Your Audience

The other day, I mentioned I was going to a convention to sell shirts.  The convention was PhenomeCon, a day-long event that featured the usual convention fare, speakers, vendors, etc.  My company, Progressive Design Apparel, printed the convention’s shirts and setup as a vendor at the event.  Ben, from our art department, created a great design for us to sell on shirts at PhenomeCon.  We printed 72 shirts on smoke, aloe, independence red, city green, and lake Anvil T’s.

Ben’s design incorporated various imagery from the paranormal world, angels, skulls, and ghosts.  It also had a Ghostbusters quote for a little humor–”Back off man, I’m a scientist.”  Instead of normal plastisol, we used discharge and water-based black.  For those that don’t know, plastisol is the type of ink most shirts are printed with.  It’s a plasitc-based ink and can be a little heavy.  Discharge is a chemical reaction that takes the die out of the fabric.  The reason you’d do this is twofold, 1) because it adds zero weight to the shirt, and 2) it allows you to add lighter, water-based ink without the dark shirt color bleeding through.  The combination of discharge and water-based black gives the shirts a light feel and an extremely soft hand.

Everyone loved Ben’s design, so I boxed up the shirts and headed south to Columbus, Indiana’s Crump Theater, location of PhenomeCon.  We knew our audience.  Or so we thought.  Turns out we got lots of compliments on the shirts there as well.  But we didn’t sell very many.  Why?

It wasn’t the price; no one tried to haggle.  It wasn’t the design; lots of people told us it was cool.  It turns out that there was a unique physical characteristic that the majority of the audience shared.  And this hampered our sales.  In fact, it entirely hamstringed our success.

Lesson learned?

Know your audience.

Don’t just know what your audience likes.  Know who they are.  Know why they like what they like.  Know why they don’t like what they dislike.  Knowing who your audience is and not just the perfect item to sell them will make sure you don’t end up like me, with a box of product and a convention of interest.

Biltmore. Ghosts. Not Biltmore ghosts.

In case any of my regular readers (lol @ the thought of me having regular readers) have wondered what happened to me, I’ll share.

I’ve gotten tons and tons of hits since I last posted.  Apparently, I’m now decently ranked in Google for a Ronald McDonald image search.  Also from that same post, a lot of people search for the freaky clown bed Homer built Bart.

I was gone half of last week. I was in North Carolina. We stayed at the Biltmore. Toured the house and gardens. Pretty amazing place.

This image (click for full-size) is a panorama of the Biltmore with pictures I took stitched together using a great little program called Hugin. It was the first time I ever tried doing this and it was a handheld series of photos, so I don’t need the criticism. It did turn out darn good though.

This week, I was getting ready for a convention I’m going to tomorrow. Somehow I ended up signing myself and my wife up to go to a paranormal convention to sell shirts. They’re awesome and everyone loves them, so I’m hoping we’ll sell out. I was having a hard time getting the shirts out of PDA without all the employees scarfing them up.  Of course, a perk to selling them is I get one for myself!

We also just got two new employees at PDA, one of which I’ve been pretty extensively training. (With my experience as a high school Biology teacher, training is a given–and I really enjoy it.) They’re both really nice girls. We all get along really well and go out to lunch together and hang out sometimes on weekends and holidays. It would be cool if the new girls like us enough to hang out with us.

Speaking of dinner with friends, I’m going to dinner with my wife’s friends in a little while, so I’ll wrap it up!

6 Words That Define Your Product

I came across a post today that “Hemingway was challenged to write a story in only six words.” He came up with, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Even alcoholic misogynists can have their brilliance.

If you can whittle your brand, your product, your image, your career, even you down to 6 words, you can get a better grasp on who or what you really are. I’ll give you examples from my life:

Progressive Design Apparel (PDA): Colorful, creative, happy place to work.
Promotional Products: Used wisely, best bang for buck.
Bella apparel: Soft and cute; everyone agrees 100%.
Alo apparel: Bella’s great, moisture-wicking exercise line.
UltraClub organic T: Softest organic T, unbeatable price point.
Dri-duck endangered species hat: Soft, organic cotton; adjustable and pre-embellished.
Myself: Forever student; sometimes funny; always honest.

How would you tell your story or the story of your product in 6 words? I’ll do a few more to get your wheels turning:

GM: Crumbling giant, epitome of corporate incompetence.
Starbucks: Grew too fast, lost reality grasp.
Windows Vista: Over delayed, under functional, software bust.
iPhone: Hyped marketing; new AT&T contracts frustrate.
Global warming: People pretend to care; do nothing.
Chinese Democracy: Axl’s unfinished masterpiece? Axl’s big joke?
2007 New England Patriots: 18 and 1, perfect season choke.

Now your turn…

Sink or Swim at Your Tradeshow

As I mentioned the other day, I attended a tradeshow last week. Now, most tradeshows are arranged so that you can look out over the floor and see a bunch of vendors at the same time. This means your (potential) customers or competitors can watch you; and you can watch them. Just like a predator can tell that its prey is weak, others at the tradeshow will be able to tell whether you’ll sink or swim. How you perform at tradeshow is indicative of how you run your business. I said in my last post that with everyone offering virtually the same product will make price easily the defining factor that separates you from your competition. But it’s really service that should be the big indicator. Taking it even further, in a word, what makes you a winner or a loser in business—or sports; or music; or life—is preparation.

When you show up to a trade show do you have all of your materials? Do you have samples or a demonstration model? Do you know your new products cold? If not, you’re in trouble. Someone will surely ask what makes the ’08 version better than the previous. Or they will think your spiel is great, but if only they could try one or take one with them to show the person who makes the decisions. If people stop by and you don’t have even some literature to show them, you’re just plain out of luck.

On Friday, everyone I met was knowledgeable about their product. That’s obviously a minimum requirement. Past that, there were some people who had a table full of samples; some who had a stack of catalogs and other information; some who had a big presentation setup. In a few cases, the company’s representative had all of these things. I bumped into many of my suppliers and it was easy to tell which ones would get an increase in business from me.

I’ve had one supplier that’s gone through the fire to get one of my jobs done and make my client happy. He was there. And you can bet he was prepared. We’ll call him “Adam;” because that’s his name. My coworker, Traci, came in with me to check out Adam’s setup. He had a giant presentation board with multiple samples of everything his company makes. And when Traci wanted to know if Adam made headphone clips, he filled her hands with samples for her to use. Adam knows it’s a two-for. If he’s prepared and does an excellent job, Traci and I will work with him again. But he also knows if Traci and I are knowledgeable and have samples of his product, we’ll get him even more business because we’ll be prepared.

So the next time you need to go to a tradeshow or send someone to a tradeshow, remember that you can’t fool people if you’re unprepared. Alex Rodriguez couldn’t succeed in the playoffs if he didn’t go to batting practice. And you can’t succeed in business if you aren’t prepared.

Insights From A Trade Show

On Friday I attended a trade show for those of us in the promotional products industry. It was here in Indianapolis, actually just a stone’s throw away from PDA. My fellow colleagues and I headed over, put on the obligatory name tag and began to circulate. Below are the take home messages from my latest trade show experience:

• Hosting a trade show in rooms of a hotel is incredibly aggravating. The rooms are too small to allow adequate flow in, around, and out of the set up.
• The promotional products industry is full of copy cats. Everyone seems to offer the same product, making the only thing that differentiates one company from another is price or service. Some clients will choose price, but in my experience service should be the clear winner. There isn’t enough money in the world to make you look good when you deliver an empty promise of a promotional product the day after an event.
• Despite what it seems like, there is more to the success of a promotion than just buying pens. There are lots of options; you just have to make sure your supplier isn’t lazy and will work to find the right solution for you. For example, there are lots of new and innovative products and ways of making products that might work for you. It just might be worth it for you to spend the extra x% and get your product sublimated.
• The trend in 2008, as I’ve mentioned before, is green promotional products. Pens made out of corn, travel mugs made out of potatoes, tote bags made with organic cotton, 100% biodegradable plastic Frisbees; eco is everywhere this year. I saw each of these items at the show on Friday and even got to take a few of them back to the office. Think about going green so that you’re seen as a leader in your industry and not just the next guy to jump on the bandwagon. You’ll then be able to say, you were green before green was cool.

Where Do Super Bowl Shirts Come From?

By now, you’ve probably seen Giants Super Bowl XLII Champions shirts. The Giants had their parade yesterday in New York and unless I’m the only one on the mailing lists of places like Champs, Eastbay, Dick’s, etc. you probably got an email trying to sell you one. You’ve probably wondered where all the shirts come from. If I had to guess, you probably think they come from a third world country where people get pennies on the dollar to hand draw each shirt in 30 seconds.

The good news is that’s not actually the case. Now, I am not a higher up in Nike, Reebok, or Adidas so I can’t tell you where all the shirts come from. But I can tell you some good news. Lots of those shirts come from right here in America. The company I work for, Progressive Design Apparel here in Indianapolis, not only does promotional products but also screen printing and embroidery. We do custom work, where you come in tell us about your needs and design apparel that meets your needs and contract work, where a company sends us product (shirts, hats, jackets, anything) and we either put their artwork on the product or we create the artwork and put it on the customer supplied apparel. Some companies do only one or the other kind of work, but we do both. One is only better than the other depending on a business’ goals.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowl shirts. As I said, many are produced by normal Americans like you and I. Actually, as a point of specification, the manufacturing of a t-shirt is usually not done in place like Indianapolis, rather the decorating. So the blanks may be made in Honduras, for example, but printing them with a Giants Super Bowl XLII Champs design is done here Indianapolis. At PDA (Progressive Design Apparel), the guys who print shirts are Dave and Jonathan (you can see the whole team here). So last week a truck-load of shirts were shipped into PDA and on Friday after the last job was done, the Super Bowl shirt screens were set up. (I’ll explain screens another day.) On Sunday after the game—which ended about 10:15 p.m. Indianapolis time—the crew came in and setup the Giants on the press. They put the first shirt on and let it rip.

Our shirt capacity is around 1,000 shirts an hour, so assuming at that time of night there’s no loss of efficiency you can easily figure out how long it took for our guys to pump out the 3,000 shirts we did. Aside: That’s actually a smaller number than in previous years, because for example last year when the Colts won, there was a greater need for shirts in the immediate Indianapolis area. With the teams being in New Jersey and Massachusetts, clearly demand isn’t as high if it’s a Super Bowl win by a team within a few hundred miles of here—which is actually a large number since Indianapolis is located within an 8 hour drive of roughly half the U.S. population. I didn’t get a chance to ask because everyone who came in on Sunday night got Monday off and yesterday they were back to working hard, but they probably didn’t get home until 1:30-2 a.m.

There you go: most Super Bowl shirts come from normal, everyday guys right here in (as Ned Flanders would say), “that space between New York and L.A. called ‘America.’” Actually we do more than just Super Bowl shirts; I remember seeing at least 3 of the NFL playoff teams getting printed here, plus I know I’ve seen a handful of NBA shirts done in the past few months. Who’s your favorite team? You may be wearing one of our shirts.