Is Business, in fact, Business?.

I’ve been spending some time thinking.

And then some more time. I did have a phone conversation with Pam Slim about the Tiny Run concept, where it’s been, where I’d like it to go. One of her points to me in our forty-five minute conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed was that she just wrote a blog post the day before that dealt with many of the things we were talking about. Another point was that initially, passion can drive everything, but that eventually, that passion will not be able to withstand the rigor of sustaining the business. There is a breaking point.

And so, there needs to be a plan.

I’ve been formulating a plan. And the holidays too, they do distract. But I’ve been thinking that Tiny Run Year One is coming to a close, and that the next year, for Year Two…I have to say, I have big things I’m thinking of. The longer I take to brew them the larger the ideas become. But behind the ideas, in the quiet dark, a more complete infrastructure is forming. Something that can sustain itself. I have to say I’m very excited for the things to come even though I still have some figuring to do, numbers to crunch, and prototypes to make.

Again, with the greatest love, I say: more soon.

Gone Shoppin.

Once I started paying wholesale prices for shirts, I couldn’t comprehend going back to buying retail. Oddly, I’ve never been a big clothes shopper in general.

I do go to American Apparel retail stores, but only to check color. But recently, as certain garments of mine have been rendered threadbare through cumulative time of dedicated service to covering my ape-like body from prying eyes, I went shopping.

I went to a mid-range chain where initially I found little to surprise me. Why anyone would screen print argyle onto a shirt I simply do not understand. If you’re going to screen print, and you can do whatever you want with three or four colors, I’d go ahead and do something a little different. But you might have guessed that.

After finding a few inconsequential fashion choices that aren’t available via my wholesale accounts, I wandered through the ‘other side’ of the store, which contained all the various apparel not related to my age or gender.

The kids section blew me away.

I know they are spending pennies on labor in a foreign country because for these wearables, they’d have to. I saw layers of screen printing, appliqué, and embroidery all over the place and even screen printed appliqué that then was embroidered to the shirt. One of them pictured here again with the argyle, what up, but still. I was floored.

There were racks and racks of crazy stuff and combinations that I’ve never seen anywhere. There was nothing like this in the adult sections of this same store. Have I missed websites or stores that have this sort of gear for adults? Is there some main stream aversion to complicated, layered decoration on adult shirts?

Ah, crap.

I changed the theme of the site roughly a month ago? I go and look at this site of slick and professional e-commerce sites and now I feel all honky and unprofessional.

So many things to do. New design should be ready for this weekend, I’m trying to get the next three or four done at the same time, and we know how this goes. I’m still here though, loving this idea, however much I think it could look better…

No Prototype Yet.

I haven’t finished the next prototype yet, so please hold. It doesn’t have anything to do with the above image, if you were concerned or unfortunately excited.

More soon.

Blast from Screenprinting Past.

It was a very long time ago that I screen printed these pairs of underwear. It was back when I first started printing, and I was unable to get a single satisfactory print. But I kept trying anyway. Still unwilling to concede defeat after mis-printing a few pair, I stuffed them into a box to be unearthed now several years later.

I wonder at the design, as I still like it, but it clearly falls under the ‘clever’ category, which I’ve been trying so hard to avoid. I’m uncertain, but would anyone be interested in this sort of thing? I could conceive of doing a very short tiny run of these if enough people displayed initial interest. The print quality would be much improved, of course, and the variety of color availability would be the usual tiny run madness, I’m sure.

Blackbirds. NO! BLUEBIRDS!.

“Blackbirds. NO! BLUEBIRDS!”
Hilesh Patel (embroidered by Michael)
Design run of 11/22/2008 through 12/06/2008

This is a rethreading of an older embroidery interpretation of Hilesh’s work that was used in one of my first batik-embroidery mix experiments. I wasn’t too amazed by those original results, but I gave it this recent try and just fell in love with version of blue on blue. There are multiple variables with this design that result in a less clean, ever so slightly less precise embroidery. These could be cleaned, reworked, updated, but I find myself really loving the imprecision of this. After so many hours fighting to get every single stitch to be perfect, I really comfortable with digging this one just as it is.

My favorite is the blue, but I understand some people prefer to go more non-chromatic, and I couldn’t help thinking of Jack Kerouac and his Blues and Haikus album, and a haiku therein where he says, in that amazing voice of his, “Blackbird. NO! BLUEBIRD!”

I gleefully imagine Tiny Run viewers deliberating a purchase making the same exclaimed reversal mid-decision.

Tiny Steeping.

I saw these tea bags (a serger stitch? let me see that!) on the desk of a co-worker today and commented on the interesting design. Upon examining, the beauty of the stitching being continued past the ‘bag’ and out to eventually be stitched through the tag. Very nice.

I inquired further about the packaging the bags came in, naturally assuming that it also was pretty awesome, textured, stitched or made of an unusual material. Considering the tea industry, and some of the boxes and containers I’ve seen, I figured it would be amazing.

Nope. Kinda plain jane.

What a missed opportunity. Considering the labor to sew the bags themselves, I would think that a box they put multiples of the bags in would have seen as much attention. Sure, a four-color tin is expensive, but so is hand sewing each and every tea bag.

This tin tell me so little, certainly not a package I have to pick up just to check out the texture, and no allusion to the neat little bags that lie within. It’s really disappointing.

And then, I thought, wait, are there things I’m missing like this with Tiny Run? I just changed my page theme drastically, am still messing with it, and I can’t help but wonder about some big things that I might be missing. Perhaps I’m missing something easy, a theme continuation that might just carry all the work already there forward just a little bit more. It’s not a new feeling.

To that end, and to try to develop things further, point out things that I’ve missed, and just keep pushing, I’ve enlisted Pam Slim from escapefromcubiclenation.com, for a brief coaching session next Wednesday. Hopes are running high for this to yield some interesting information; I’m very much look forward to an outsider looking in on things.

Tiny run visitors are notorious for not commenting, but anybody notice anything I’m missing?