Editing The Pen Addict 78/transcript (section)

== International Orders ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'll be interested to find out the person is the furthest away. You know? Yeah, that's a good question. I wonder what country would be the furthest country that you have to ship to.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Yeah. I know we've had some India. Yeah. That's cool.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Singapore was like the most obscure one that I've seen. That's incredible, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All the way out in Singapore.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Mm-hmm. Yep. That's going to be cool.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I hope that person's listening right now.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' I hope so.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I hope so.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' You know, that's... It's going to be cool to be able to ship these all over the world and get the feedback from different people using them from different things and, you know, help us learn how to, you know, continue to make even better products. I mean, it can only be good.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, let's look at a little bit about the future business model of your company. So, we have a Kickstarter project which has given you initial funding to set up the company to get some of the tools that you need also to build a customer base. And then, as we've mentioned before, you're then going to have like an ongoing store, which will be at notco.com. But then, when you're launching new products, do you think that you will launch them directly? Do you think you might go down the Kickstarter route again?

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' No, I think we're going to launch directly.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, that's quite interesting to me. What if you went with something really sort of out there?

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Yeah. I think we would consider Kickstarter for a large project if we needed specific machinery tooling. If we were trying to accomplish something very specific or very large, it wouldn't – I don't think you're going to see pen cases from us on Kickstarter again. But you could see something different. I mean, I don't know. I don't – there's no product in my head that I'm thinking of. I'm not, you know, being coy. I'm just saying that this could be another Kickstarter project.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' What about if you wanted to make a pen, right? Oh, sure. You know, you would need new tools to actually do that.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm not opposed to going back to Kickstarter for different types of funding. But I think in general, when we launch new products, they're going to be through the online store.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I don't actually think it would be possible for you to make a pen. I feel like you wouldn't be able to settle with yourself on that.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Yeah, I think that's what's prevented me from doing that for so long. And you and I have talked for years about, you know, me starting something. And I think my hesitancy before was always that I didn't want to do a pen for kind of that reason. It was like, well, how am I going to, you know, design this? Or am I ever going to be happy with it?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It would have to be the perfect pen, wouldn't it? In theory, you know, because of the type of person that you are. Right. You would need to, it wouldn't be allowed to have a floor.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Right. That would probably keep me up at night a lot. That would be difficult. Which is why I never did it, which is why it took so long to just find the right, the thing that I felt was right. And the, you know, the business partner that I felt was right to work with.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Because I guess with what you guys are making now, it's easier to make a product that is without flaws. I imagine just because the intricacies of a pen and the variables that are there are extremely high. But with great materials put together in a really great way, I assume it's probably a bit easier to nail what you guys are doing. You can please correct me if I'm wrong.

'''Myke Hurley:''' No, and I think being able to control the manufacturing gives us a huge amount of leeway as well. We're not ordering, you know, a thousand in each color and each type from some factory, you know. And each case is a living thing, if you will, you know. Like if 20 people have a complaint about the high tower, then we might be able to alter something small in that. And it'll be a different usability within that case. And with a pen or something like that, I don't think you can do that as easily. You can't have 100 versions of the same pen because we obviously can't manufacture it ourselves. It'd be through a third party and it would be very tricky. And he always has different favorite pens too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's the thing, right? That would make it quite difficult. You know, you've just mentioned something there, Jeff, which is such an obvious point, but it's only really just occurred to me now. What kind of makes the Kickstarter that you two are doing different to many Kickstarters of this type is the people that are making it are the ones that are, the guys that are actually putting it together are the ones that are putting up the page. Quite frequently, with many of these projects, not all, but many, you will see a, I don't know, what are they called the project owners? Is that the right term? They will have contractors that make the stuff for them. Let's look at the Visionaire, for example. The Visionaire compared to the RenderK. So at Karis Customs, they make their stuff themselves. At Visionaire, we have absolutely no idea what he's doing. Right. And, you know, and so that's quite interesting to me that you guys are actually building this stuff. That's cool. That's really cool. Because I think it's quite rare even with this. Because you have to have the experience, which doesn't, you know, not everybody has. Especially people that are interested in Kickstarter because they tend to be a more techie bunch.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Mm-hmm. I mean, I think that was important to us from the get-go just for our future business growth. We, Jeff and I, want to have that flexibility that you can only get when you're the one with your hands on the product. You know, we're going to be touching all these products ourselves. The stitches that go, you know, on these cases are, you know, being laid down by Jeff's hands. And that's important to us because, you know, like Jeff was alluding to, we can adjust on the fly if needed to from a manufacturing perspective. But what's important to me is to have that, I don't know, fast turnaround for future projects to where I could sketch up a prototype. And in a week, Jeff's got something cut and stitched in my hands. And we can say, oh, this is crap. Or, oh, this might be interesting. And I think that's the only, not the only way for us to go forward, but I think that's the best way in our situation for what we're trying to accomplish. You know, not to be, we don't want to be like a, like a pen case mill that's just going to make generic, you know, two or three products over and over again. And we want to make unique stuff constantly. So, you know, having that, that hands-on manufacturing, I think for us is the only way to go.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm pleased.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' So are we.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we're now at 1,947 backers. That's 74,271. So one of the interesting things that you've got as opposed to backers is, you know, people can raise their pledges. So for anybody listening to this, what would be the reason in your mind, Brad, for somebody, you know, who's maybe at the $30 level to maybe bump up to one of the other project levels, like the pledging levels?

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' I think there's such a, there's a variance in the products, a variety of uses for the products. Just Jeff coming over to the house today, I've showed him what I've used my chimney top for. I don't even use it for pens, but I use it for pen-related things. I have all my spare nibs in one of our chimney top cases, and it's totally the perfect case. And then, you know, I have something completely on the opposite side of the thing in the Brasstown with the rollout tongue where I can protect the nice pens that I want. But then I've got that little extra pouch where I can throw in like a phone cable and a pocket knife that, you know, I carry around with me. There's so many different uses for each of these cases. And heck, there's probably uses we haven't even thought of yet that someone, I know as soon as we sent out these prototypes, people were doing things that we hadn't even considered with them. You know, like Ed Jelly, you know, had one of the lookout, the three-pin holsters and the way he was attaching his notebooks to it. I was like, we didn't even consider that. And, you know, that's kind of a nice little thing. And then that gives us, you know, ideas for future projects that, you know, hey, let's sketch something out around this and things like that. So I think there's a lot of flexibility in all of the products to where you can really kind of make them fit what you need to happen with the cases.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's such a shame that my prototype got lost in the post.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' That's crazy, isn't it?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's so sad that that happened.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Well, you know how many more prototypes you have than me? None? Zero, zero.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Send them all out.

'''Jeffrey Bruckwicki:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But I bet you've got products now, though.