Brain Dump… I came across that term sometime this week in regards to thinking your business plans out. I think it was mentioned on one of the linkedin groups I subscribe to. I don’t recall. The idea is to just write everything down that you could think of regarding getting your business started, back on track, or whatever… a brain dump. So I thought I’d do a little Friday Brain Dumping.
ENABLING – I saw a twitter this morning that directed you to a great site whose focus is on finding free commercial use fonts. So I spent a good chunk of this morning downloading. lol! If you are in need of some fonts, check out Font Squirrel. Great stuff!
After I grabbed a good amount of fonts, I didn’t want to unzip them all individually… I am lazy (just ask Jeanine)… So I came across BitZipper (free trial) that will unzip files in a batch. I checked WinZip but didn’t see that option. BitZipper worked like a charm. I might just have to buy it now for all my batch unzipping. lol!
Last Friday, I spent three hours (yes 3!) weeding the front yard. I ended up with an entire 33 gallon garbage can filled with just weeds… crazy… Today, the lawn looked pretty good and I only was out there for 30 minutes weeding. I’m hoping to get a little time over the weekend to weed some in the back yard before they overrun my flowers. My allergies have been crazy bad this year and I have been living on Zyrtec every day practically. Hopefully that dependence will STOP soon!!!
What a great start to the day… lol!
I came across another twitter link to this No Spec blog post. Back in the day (and I’m talking years and years ago) when I kept up with the web design industry and was a real web designer, I was a firm believer in not doing work on spec. And if the website was a small one, I often made the client pay 100% upfront (for a one-two page site). I never showed a design to a client on spec. EVER.
Fast forward several years (showing my age…) in the licensing business, spec work runs rampant. Do you or don’t you? A year ago, when Kristy Valshan signed our first licensing contract, we asked for an advance. That is getting much harder to do as time goes on. Manufacturers no longer just make a product and go out and sell it. More often than not, they pitch a digital rendition to the buyer and if there is interest, move on to the next stage and present a physical comp and if the buyer likes it then they move to the final production stage.
We have been caught both ways…. getting an advanced for specing a product that ended up with a warm fuzzy YES from the buyer only to be produced and the buyer not moving ahead with the order (thank goodness we got an advance or we would not have gotten paid for any of our work). We have also been on the end of doing digital spec work, having it pitched and getting a warm fuzzy YES from the buyer, only to lose the order in the next physical comp stage because we wouldn’t do the physical comp without getting paid for our time. (In that case, the manufacturer did the physical comp which the buyer turned down) It’s an incredibly fine line to walk in the licensing industry. It seems more and more companies are looking for the designer to invest their time into a pitch (unpaid time) before they even find out if there is going to be a product at all.
I think for myself, I am starting to lean more towards providing a digital comp of a product (as we have found that it’s hard for the manufacturer to envision our designs on their own products so we have to do it for them) and then depending on the company (large vs small, art dept vs none, big deal vs small change), we might push for an advance to do the physical comp or let the company do the physical comp and hope for the best. We have been burned both ways so I don’t have an answer for every situation. It seems every situation is truly different and we are definitely still feeling ourselves out in this industry.
Speaking of licensing, I was fortunate to be able to participate in Jeanette Smith’s licensing workshop this week. She offered a three day (2 hour per day) mini-camp on licensing (general, sales and contracts). A lot of it is common sense and just doing it, but it’s still really great to listen and get re-energized and know that you really are on the right path. I do that with Dave Ramsey too. Even though I read his books and know the plan, it’s still nice to listen to his radio show once a week and stay on track with the plan. Get energized!!
I am very excited to be flying out next Friday to stay with Jeanine and go to the stationery show. Usually by now, we would have seen each other face to face – it’s been since September since I was out there. We do “see” each other though via video – that has made things much easier for us. When we need to show something to each other, we can just hold it up for the camera. Lol! We have been working like mad this week to prep for some meetings while I’m in town. It’s been awhile since we were actively out there pushing our licensing and its been really great to get going again!
Well there you have it… my Friday Brain Dump… lol! Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for playing. 😉
Happy Friday!
