Hot angel

Heaven like this? Please God.

Where are they now? No43 - Wolf

What a great photo - and signed no less - this could be worth pence. Apparently he was a right humorless get. I remember Cathy telling me that Max used to wind him up when they did panto together, and he kept saying that he shouldn't take the piss because the kids look up to him.

James and the giant fountain

Thanks to Terry and Jill for this beautiful photo of James.

For info, he's looking at the big camp mirrored knob fountain outside the millennium centre in Cardiff.

The story of Shufflicious - making an ipod case to sell

This is the story of one mans simple crusade to produce a stylish ipod case that isn't a glorified condom, in the face of adversity from having no idea how to do it, erratic manufacturers and suppliers, and all under the knowledge that ultimately you are at the mercy of Uncle Steve Jobs and his iPod massive.



If, like me, you've got the concentration span of a goldfish, then there is a list of lessons learnt at the bottom. For the rest of you - read on for all the fun of the fair...

On january 11th last year Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle, and although I loved its simplicity and size, I thought it looked a bit - well - dull. For the first time I thought that someone could do something that was more interesting than the usual skin case.

Then a thought struck me - I'm reasonably creative, I've got about 2/3000 quid ($5000) to throw at it before I'd have to start selling the kids - I could make a really cool case to sell, everyone would want it, and then I'll be a trillionaire. BWAHAHAHAHA. How hard could it be? What I did know is that it was important to come to market as quickly as possible, before the 3 - 6 month buzz period that happens after every ipod launch had ended.

I started playing around with designs in January and because I'm such a cheap skate prudent I downloaded a trial copy of Illustrator and started putting some stuff together. With a normal ipod the front is totally active space and the back totally passive, thats why its hard to do anything interesting with case shape. Whats great about the shuffle is that because the controls were shared between front and back there is much more passive space to work with in a design. I'd made a pendant at college that was ceramic oblong with a rubber o-ring cut into shallow spikes around the outside (looked better than it sounds - I think), but when I recreated it Lou said that it was too masculine, so i worked on some curvier designs and looked for women to test them on.

Now, contrary to popular belief, before I was married I was fighting off the honeys, but now with small children, I have no social life - and if I did it would be dangerous to openly flaunt my sexual magnetism. Consequently I turned to my workplace for female opinion. My day job is in a software development company, and we are blessed in the sea of testosterone with not one but two women in the department. So I ran a couple of iterations past Sam and Sally.



At the same time as fine tuning the designs with my extensive focus group, I was trawling the internet for manufacturers. The UK based manufacturers were, on the whole, hopeless - no idea of what an ipod was - no time for anyone who didn't know what they were on about, or were just incapable of returning a call. Ha - a few knock backs weren't going to stop me from world domination.

There was one exception. A company that had factories in China but administrated and designed stuff in the UK. I'll not name them here as it will become apparent that it may not be the kind of reference case they would want on tinternet.

So 22 days after the shuffles launch I found and contacted them. They got back to me within minutes of my email, which is always impressive, especially as they attached a copy of their confidentiality agreement - plans for world domination tend to need to be kept under wraps.

At this stage I just needed to know whether it was going to be something I could afford. They said it would be around £500 to get the mould made but told me sending a 2D design with measurements should be fine for giving an accurate quote. So I started slaving away with my trial copy. I decided to go for a single design as I knew that thats probably all I could afford. Therefore I needed to go for something that was appealing to both sexes. I settled on a initial shape and on February 28th I sent through my first designs, that I'd carefully done in Illustrator along with my measurements.



What a total waste of precious time - unless you're designing a brick, you need a proper CAD as its impossible to describe a complex 3D structure in 2D. I tried to add more info, conscious that my 30 day love-in with Adobe was coming to an end - but a week and a half later they finally broke the bad news.

"I have had a quick meeting with our designers who have taken a look at the drawings for this. Unfortunately they agree that getting a quote on this would be extremely doubtful as the drawings are not 3d and also very hard to understand. From a manufacturing point of view they are not to standard."

FUCK.

"To get these designs done and get a 3d rendering on it would cost ~3,000"

DOUBLE FUCK.

Thats my budget blown before we started. Luckily, I knew someone locally who ran a manufacturing company in Ilkeston making car parts and stuff, so he must know someone who could do me a CAD. I rang him, and sure enough he put me in touch with a couple of people, one who was a friend of a friend and lived about a mile away from my house. Perfect, having been frustrated with how long everything took with the company I was tryng to get a quote from - here is someone I can see in person. 10 days later, Kevin had patiently listened to me, tried to decipher my drawings, and produced a gorgeous CAD of the case very cheaply as a favour. I sent a rough one through without the spikes for a quick quote and then sent the totally finished one through a week later.



I'd wasted a month or so but now we're cooking. But, I still have no idea of how much this is going to cost. Kevin had also told me that the guy who I'd rung to get his number did the kind of stuff i needed, and so I felt like I'd stupidly spent the last 2 months needlessly dealing with someone else. Oh well, I'd gone this far, and its always good to get more than one quote. So I sent my design through to them both.

First one came back from the local company. Lou forwarded it on to me at work.

"Budget price for single cavity tooling £11,500."

fockin beegeesus. 11 grand - and thats the budget price - the other company said it was going to be £500!

4 days later I get the other quote, and whilst the unit prices are very similar, the tooling cost was radically different.

Tooling cost: £1030
Lead-time: 4 weeks

OK. Whats the catch? To be fair to the local company, when I mentioned the vast difference they said...

"The bargain pricing is down to rates of pay. UK toolmaking charge out rates vary from around £20-£35 depending largely on tool complexity and geographic location. Chinese rates of pay are very much less. Advances in machine tool technology have closed the quality gap in all but the demanding tooling projects. So no longer does China automatically mean inferior quality. There as anywhere else there is still variation between firms in quality. It's best to go to a tooling agent on recommendation from someone with good experiences.

The biggest problems with off shore tooling is shipping the tool to the UK should you wish to take full possession of the mould and also product copyright / confidentiality issues."

OK. Point taken, and in retrospect there were some warnings in there, but I didn't take much heed because I could now afford to TAKE OVER THE WORLD.



So on the 11th April, I felt like the man as I signed the terms of reference defining the costs and timescales of the project. In 4 weeks I'll have a sample, in a further 5 i'll have 5000 of them here, ready to go. The middle of June. woohoo.

On the 3rd of May, a week before I'm due to get the samples, I figure that they must be leaving the factory and mail for an update. But there has been a problem.

"The tooling was actually more complex to make than the factory had thought on quote. This is good news in that fact that the tooling should have been a lot more expensive."

Now I'm worried because we are due to go on a trip with the kids in France for July and August. Lou left me in no doubt that it would not be acceptable to run things remotely whilst on the once-in-a-lifetime holiday paid for from her late mothers hard earned estate. It was perfectly clear. If I ruined the holiday then there would be one less person coming back from France.

"We are looking at a delivery date of sample to be between the end of the week of the May 16th and the beginning of the following week. Hopefully the sooner date."

20th to 24th of May. OK. Even with this set back I figured I would have a couple of weeks to get someone to send out the orders on my behalf. I voice my concerns about the slippage and they reckon that a realistic proposition is getting the full shipment for 1st July. We cancel the first week of the holiday to accommodate this and now we leave on the 8th July. I'm not flavour of the month in our house, but it'll all work out for good in the end.

I start ringing about the 20th, and my usual contact is off, so by the 24th I'm ringing her boss to see where we are. At about 5pm on the 27th I receive an email with pictures of the elusive first samples.



Oh that looks OK - funny color but - wait - WHERE ARE THE SPIKES? and then it dawned on me, after all this time, they had tooled the wrong fockin design. Oh my God - the rough one I sent them to begin with.

I could not believe it, I felt sick. I just sat staring at the picture for a moment or two not daring to tell Lou for a bit, as if saying it out loud made it more real. I rang them back in shock, and to be fair to them they organised an immediate tele-conference, where we talked over the consequences of the blunder. The name of the correct file was on the contract, so there was no issue with culpability, and luckily the main dimensions of the case were the same, so that it was only the spikes and the logo that had changed, and they could rework this tool rather than start from scratch.

But the game had significantly changed - there was no way I was going to get the main lot of cases before france now, so the best I could hope for is to get the correct samples signed off before I went. This feeling of pissing-in-the-wind wasn't confined to the production of the cases.



At the same time as sorting out the samples I was looking at what I would use as a lanyard. My ideal was an enamelled ball chain, but the one company in the world I could find to do it, couldn't return phone calls or emails. As a plan B, I decided to look at stuff with the logo on, and went as far as getting a sample made from Aaron at Online promos who were half the price of any other companies i could find. If you can turn a blind eye to their crazy lanyard web site they seem very good. They manufacture in China, but the whole process from design and sample to delivery takes less than 20 days. Unfortunately, the lanyard fixing made the case look way too big when it was all connected. I had to get some contact from the chain company. I couldn't order straight away because I needed to see which chain widths would be best to get through the loop at the top of the cases. It took three phone calls to get the sales guy to send the samples, but when I got them they weren't the chains I specified, just a velvet bag of random chains that nobody else had bought, which was utterly pointless. I gave up.

Meanwhile, I had two lots of further case samples, the first in June with the correct design and in two different hardnesses, and the second ones at the beginning of July with the specified black and pink and better shape around the grooves. I knew they weren't perfect yet - some of the grooves that held the wires weren't as grippy as I wanted them to be, but I needed to be pragmatic, so I signed them off on July 8th, the day we left for France.

We had a great time in France, despite the initial journey, and I hoped that on the other side of the earth everything was going like clockwork. Hmmm fat chance.

We got back at the end of August, and I excitedly received the 10 boxes of cases on September 7th. I opened a couple of bags of each color and although there were a few problems on a few - THEY WERE HERE.

I built the web site and did the designs for the packaging, the two things I could do for myself. I had also finally managed to confirm that the chain company could custom make my favourite ball bar chain and enamel it in my required finishes. I made the decision to order without getting samples - I didn't have time to wait - and for once it paid off. Once the order was taken everything was very professional and speedy and the results were beautiful.



Right, I'll start with putting an advert on my favorite community web site and open that Swiss bank account, ready to transfer the oodles of money from paypal. I get the invoice and pay the money and wait for my 125,000 impressions. By this stage in the fable you'll not be surprised to know there is a problem. According to their records the ads have been served already. Uhh - either they haven't or its been the most spectacular failure in the history of advertising. Whats that - you'll get the stats - OK - tick, tick - 1 month - changed the servers - never been this difficult before - tick, tick. Nearly 2 months later, I still haven't got any info.

That particular fuck-up paled into insignificance against those in the manufacturing. I opened up the boxes over the next week I found increasing problems with the cases. In the end I frantically opened all the boxes, like a duped man in a drugs deal, only to find more and more misshapen ones. Of the 5000 I had 1991 were too bad to sell. Yes I had to go through every one. Yes it was like sticking pins in my eyes - and I wasn't being that fussy. I found that with some you could manually manipulate them back into shape. I wearily contacted the factory and arranged to get the faulty ones uplifted. Apparently they hadn't waited for them to cool before packing them up in bags of 50. Go team! The only thing that could be worse than this is if Apple cancels the shuffle before Christmas, but that wouldn't happen. Would it? Despite its initial success the shuffle had had some knocks saying that its lack of innovation was hurting the iPod brand - and Steve's got form with knocking off projects.

When you're wholly reliant on somebody elses business like you are with producing iPod stuff every iPod nuance and rumor becomes important, and if Apple announce an event you are intensely interested. So it was at the beginning of September. I watched nervously not knowing what they were going to announce. They hadn't done a festive period with the Shuffle but they could still cancel it. Phew - no changes except the nano had the crucial mind share now - but not too bad. My commiserations to those who had just finished building stuff for the mini.



At the moment I thought to was safe to go back in the water in comes another invite. Uncle Steve didn't mention the shuffle in either the nano or the video ipod presentations. At the end of the 5g keynote he had a slide that he said was the range for the festive period and there was no sign of it. Now i like the shuffle. I like the fact it doesn't have to be protected, that i can just stick it any pocket, that its super simple, that I don't need an extra lead. Apple could make it as small as a tiny thumb drive and make it truly wearable, which would be great.

Having what I think is a 4 month window to sell them, and not having as good a start as I'd hoped, I turn my attention to getting them into shops. I get the packaging sorted, and they look great and start contacting and sending out samples. Retailers reactions have been mixed. I've had most success with skater outlets, and shops in NY - but the others are telling me that shuffles aren't selling that well and they don't really need protection (I agree), so they are using the accessory space for nano and big iPod stuff. They are also saying that the big firms have got the skin case market sewn up, and it was only that I had something different that I could get through the front door at all. Things are looking more positive now - I'm pretty confident I'll at least cover my costs with mail order, and I'll have more colors soon which will help with the retailers.

Plan B if I they don't all sell? Well I can always fallback on the amazing hidden genitalic (is that a word - it is now) talents of the cases. I was thinking of making a chandelier made of them for brothels and S+M parlours. In the end you can't buy experience like this - you can just read about it on some poor bastards website. I must be a sado-masochist but I'm really enjoying it all.

Some late breaking news: I thought maybe I could turn a positive into a negative by getting the 2000 knackered ones back in more colors so that I'd have enough products to use Amazon marketplace. Sure enough I specified 5 new colors, and last week I get a photo sent through of them. There is suspiciously only 3 separate colors among the 5 cases photographed, but they've been photographed with a 100 pixel 3 color camera from the 1970's so I'll I guess I'll wait until I get them through. This morning I could hardly contain, cough cough, my excitement as I get the box of samples. I open it up to reveal about a 100 solid perspex cubes containing chinese figurines dressed up as a western bride and groom. WTFF?

You COULD NOT make this stuff up. Its like a sitcom - Carry on manufacturing. Mix up at the depot you say, stickers on the wrong boxes you say. Hmm. I feel sorry for the person who was expecting their kitsch loveliness and instead gets a box of tri-colored vaginas - ha - if ONLY they were shipped in their other 'mode'!

NB:Someone mentioned in the comments there was no link to the shuff site - Can you tell I'm no salesman! Its here.

The stuff I've learnt

• If you're anything like me, you don't like to make people feel bad, or under pressure or like they've done something wrong. Well start toughening up because you'll soon come to realise that they've got other concerns than you and your project. Always be polite, but always voice your concerns, because nothing will ever run smoothly and you have to roll with the punches. Remember to ask scenario questions like - if it doesn't happen by date x, what happens, do I still have to pay full price or can we write in a penalty clause. What if they arrive damaged etc. etc. Never leave anything to chance, ask all the questions you need to feel in control.


• Don't gamble with more money than you can afford. you will likely spend at least 50% more than you think you will


• Get a CAD rendering as early and cheaply as possible. My stuff was drawn by Kevin Hancock at HDSDesign who is fantastic. You can email on info at hdsdesign.demon.co.uk and tell him you heard about him here. The CAD designer can give you what amounts to a photo of the product, and from there you can start talking to retailers, you can announce the product and get a feel for the potential market without spending money on the manufacturing.


• Understand the manufacturing process. In Injection moulding they carve out a metal tool that gets injected with the rubber, cools slightly and gets shot out ready for the next one. Consequently once you've cut it out its much more difficult to fill in than cut more out. My advice then is to start with the smallest tolerances and make them thicker if necessary. Thats certainly what i'm hoping to do with the nano cases. My silicone rubber was Thermoplastic Elastomer (TPE) which comes in varying "shore" hardnesses. 28 is very soft, 35 is what I chose, and you can go much higher but like decibels its not a linear scale. The colors were defined in Pantone, and were 3 color process not solid.


• Get your product out as soon as possible, with iPod stuff you are at the mercy of Apple - you will be praying that Steve doesn't replace your product. In order to do that try to bring product, packaging and promotion together at the same time.


• Don't mess with Apple's legal department. there are strict rules on what you can and can't call products, put on your packaging etc. etc. and you can find them here. Even though I trademarked shufflicious early on in the US, and it doesn't contain the entire trademarked Shuffle, I wouldn't want to get a call from Apple legal, a cease and desist tends to hurt sales. Ever since the ipod patent mess they've got very tight with the ipod trademarks, almost as if their jobs depended on it.
  


• Don't always email - get on the phone, you'll get over the initial nerves and in the end it gets you a faster and fuller response. Remember bad news is almost as helpful as good news. Don't let someone just say they're not interested, get them to tell you why and apply that to your strategy.


• Get a barcode. Its inexpensive, it makes you look professional and opens doors to selling on, among others, Amazon. I got mine from Aurea Media


• Get proper photography. It makes a big difference. I used Ian at e-packshots.com They do a service where you send them the product in the post, and they shoot it for £22.50 ($40) a shot, (you only need to pay for one, if that all you can afford) and you get a photoshop cutout that can go on any background included in the price. It was great service, and very reasonable, I thoroughly recommend it - and again tell him that you heard about it through me.


• Talk early an often to retailers about the market. Keep your retail options open, if you go through retailers you will need proper packaging, which will probably mean blister packing, and the cheapest option for this is stock blisters. In the UK I used Mr.Blister and if it wasn't for the prohibitive shipping costs I would have used the Stock Clams from National Plastics which is based in the States.
  
  
  
  You should be looking at around 20p ($0.35) for each clamshell and 2 sided printed insert card. In terms of how much you sell for, the retailer will be looking to buy your stuff for at least 50% of what they can sell it for, and will expect a table showing the larger discounts the more they buy. They may blind you with retail science. I had to admit I didn't know what "We're looking at a 4/3 start ship - 4/17 cancel" meant. Probably obvious to you guys, it means that there is a 2 week window to get the products into the warehouse, if you haven't managed it by the second date the deal is off.
  


• Don't pay your invoices until you are satisfied you got what you paid for, if you are completely satisfied, pay your invoices promptly


• Most important of all - keep persevering, as Uncle Dobbers would say - if it were easy we'd all be doing it.

iPod and the sneetches

Remember the sneetches - half of them have bellies with stars, and half of the Sneetches have no stars on thars. The ones with stars pretend they're better and ignore the others - consequently the others want stars too.

In steps Sylvester McBean, with his magical Star-On and Star-Off Machine, who says "Step right in, I'm the Fix-it-Up Chappie. I'll change all your bellies and then you'll be happy!"

Once the ones without stars have them, the ones with stars originally want to get rid of theirs. And so it goes until McBean has relieved them of all their money.

What's this got to do with the ipod? In the beginning you could be cool by just having one, now its not cool to have one anymore - because everyone's got one. I know friends are now buying other products because iPods are too mass market. However its still the best product in its category, and Apple has bought the flash memory of the world, so its going to be hard to build anything to compete. What to do. Ultimately, I think this is a problem for Apple as they need to foster the cool people to wear their gear.

I think they're is a lot more scope for ipod cases than is currently being utilised. The stuff we have on the whole still scream out - I've got an ipod. Whereas I think they're is a market for stuff that looks really good and where you have the functionality of an ipod, without the mass market looks. I'm currently getting quotes for the nano molds - I'm going to post my renders soon. Personalisation is a big factor.