We thought it might be useful to document the process of starting an online business from scratch.
Jim Coudal and Steve Delahoyde will periodically post here about issues involving our
product and business plan. Hopefully things will go well but even if the whole thing goes down in flames,
it’ll probably be interesting to watch.
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Sweat Shop Book Club
Henry Ford's got nothing on us. Here's how the assembly of 175 client DVD packages went yesterday evening. Carlos manned the printing station, cranking out the inserts, tray-liners and labels while monitoring the quality and the ink levels in the CMYK cartridges. He passed the material into the conference room. Kev affixed the labels to the burned discs (it's easy enough to do by hand in small batches, but for large quantities one of those spindle doohickeys is invaluable). Susan and I separated the tray liners and the insert books from their pre-perforated sheets. Kristin folded the trayliners along the scores, inserted them in the cases and popped in the disc trays. Michele folded the inserts, finished the assembly and acted as quality control. Dave counted and recounted and packed them into the same boxes with the same anti-static packing peanuts that the raw cases were shipped to us in. A perfect recycling.
The whole thing should have taken about an hour but we didn't realize until it was too late that each copy of my design for the cover, a full-bleed bitmap image, was going to take full minute to print. It didn't take us too long to catch up to that bottleneck. To pass the time waiting, we trashed 'The DaVinci Code.' We decided that the book was basically a poorly written Hardy Boys mystery but it must be said that we all had read it. Our excuse is that we felt a sort of cultural obligation and maybe even some guilty pleasure too. Kev made the final point that it was interesting that Christ is the only person who has sex in the thriller. We're pretty sure they'll fix that in the movie.
The Holy Grail may yet be found in Edmonton, Wichita, NYC, Chicago, Copenhagen or Jacksonville.
January 16, 2004 07:53 AM