Posh Boxes
Woohoo!!! Today the posh boxes arrived, and they turned out to be a lot better than I was expecting. Lovely. They’re made out of Rimu – which is a native NZ timber… all sustainably logged etc. Makes for a beautiful fine-grained reddish finish. The boxes themselves are made by a local firm… who CNC route them. The clasps are neo-magnets – so the box is a simple clam-shell type design. I was thinking of lining them with felt – but the space where the calipers go is about 1/2 a mm narrower than the calipers – so they don’t rattle about… well, not the ones I’ve tried so far… and it seems a shame to cover up the grain etc. I’m not actually making these myself, so don’t need to factor in labour costs etc… so can sell them for $35 USD… a lot of which is the set-up cost…
Silicone caps
So it turns out (and this is a bit of a surprise), golden mean calipers are quite popular with plastic surgeons… and one thing they’ve asked for, is little protective caps for the points so they’re not going near people’s faces with scary metal pointy things. So… there they are. They come in little plastic packs… which is to say I buy 1000 at a time, and have to sort them into little plastic bags like a drug dealer or something. I now include these with every 180mm long set of calipers. They look a bit like this – though this is an experimental (slightly smaller) set of calipers – where I tried to laser-engrave a logo… and that didn’t work at all. Quite a lot of trialing and erroring goes into these things. — Apropos of nothing, here is a picture of the NZ houses of parliament, shortly before…
Little Boxes, Little Boxes
I’m going to start approaching retailers and so on this year… and to that end, I need to make the presentation look a bit more together. I don’t want ultra-slick mass-produced looking… because I want to retain an earthenware, hand-made, clean and green kiwi vibe… though something that looks as though it’s had some care taken over it. Cos it has. Just got some prototypes from Tracey in Wellington, who designs boxes. Lovely. They’re actually too nice just to be used as packaging… …but that’s what they are… need to be postable etc. And they are… cardboard boxes. Posh though they are… so I’ve decided to get some Rimu ones made by the local CNC place. They’ll probably cost more than the calipers themselves. These are the designs I’ve made: And this is Rimu Which is from Recycled native timber Who make handmade recycled timber furniture, to order. But that…
I think I might do a blog thing for this as well
Little bits and pieces keep happening… people might find it interesting. Right now I’m sitting in the window of a caf in Cuba Street in Wellington. Cuba St is where the hipsters hang out. Martin Freeman came in earlier. He’s not a hipster, he’s a hobbit, and he had two small children in tow. Micro-hobbits… I don’t even know what you call those. Borrowers maybe. Big Borrowers. Always stealing cotton-reels and matchboxes. Still, whatever. Pictures of the caf and the street outside. I think I might move here actually. — But anyway… running a blog takes a fair bit of anti-procrastinatory will-power, a core-skill with which I find myself despairingly deficit… and I already run two other blogs. However, here it is. For all your news regarding a new-economy maker-cottage-industry. RSS here. I’ll make a proper post tomorrow.