Oct 18-22 Jen and I were in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for the 2006 X PRIZE Cup. This is the second year for the event, and the first time they have done a Lunar Lander Challenge or hosted the Space Elevator Games. The other spectacles included amateur rocket launches, rocket-powered bikes, cool spaceship mockups, a jetpack (think James Bond), and a vertical wind tunnel for virtual skydiving. We were at the event promoting Sky Fire Lab and showing off some of our newest shirt designs.I posted some pictures from the X PRIZE Cup here.
Due to some horrible, horrible customer service screw-ups by our t-shirt vendor in El Paso, I learned a LOT about silk screening during the trip. Here's the story:
We thought we'd save some time and money by getting a local company to do the printing job (instead of going with our previous vendors and shipping the merchandise). I sent in our order a week in advance to ensure time for shirt delivery and printing. What happened was that the shirts were ordered late, got delayed, and ultimately ended up being either the wrong color or completely missing. As if this was not frustrating enough, some of the shirts that did arrive were ruined by bad printing (wrong colors used, wrong side printed--you name it, we had it).
My partner, Karen, was a trooper and worked with the apathetic graphic arts guy to fix numerous errors in the complex "artwork-onto-t-shirt" process. We both stayed up all night before the show working with the production crew to get shirts done that were already 2 days late. We ended up with about one third of our intended supply of shirts/colors/sizes missing--including most of the kid's sizes and all of the girl-cut shirts.
All told, we sold about 100 shirts and made some great business contacts despite our bad location (inside an unmarked exhibition tent), numerous other t-shirt vendors, and our production woes. It was definitely a great learning experience! I am already applying some of the lessons learned to our next job making shirts for the SEDS conference.
Other things happening:
- Sky Fire Lab's online store is opening this week
- speaking at the Space Vision 2006 conference in Orlando
- Loretta and George are staying at our house for the conference
- Jen is going to Wisconsin for Veteran's Day
- Mom and Dad will be in Port Orange for the weekend
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