Yesterday our samples arrived! I was so excited to see and hold the physical product and make sure the quality and images came out like we wanted them too. They arrived from the printer in a nice simple box, each mug packaged carefully in a fitted styrofoam shell. I feel confident that mugs will arrive to people intact so that’s good. Inside of the box and the general presentation was pretty plain, but down the road we can customize that more for Fields Of Happy.
Onto the exciting stuff—the mugs! Drumroll please… my heart pounded as I opened the first one and it… it…. Looked like ass. Second one same thing, third one was the assy-est of all. Turns out the images I was using for the designs were transferring to the printer side too pixelated aka blurry. So this was a very good thing to realize before we put the site live but a a very bad thing to realize in general because it meant that I was going to need to go back to every single individual mug design (well over 100 at this point), and reload the design from my creator side to the printer in a larger, higher quality format. In other words, FML. This absolutely had to be done though since the most important thing here is the quality of the product so if the mug looks like shit, then our whole site is for nothing. Can’t have people receiving a crappy product!
So, yesterday and today I spent every waking moment I had re-doing all of the designs. It was immensely satisfying when I called Wob tonight to let him know I had conquered that monumental task. We can tell on the website that the designs look better even just in their photos, they are crisper and cleaner and much more legible. Going to reorder some samples and make sure we got it right this time, but I think we are going to be good! Very relieved to have figured that out before the site is live.
Wob and I have a goal of finishing it up by the end of this week. He’s been immersed in coding in order to put some special links in place that we want, and change some fonts to match the whole vibe of the site. I keep finding things to change and add and it’s a continually evolving process but I can tell the big pieces will be in place soon and we can set it live and then make edits as we go.
...Words of wisdom from my 6 year old as I sit here writing this: “Mom, did you know Groot started out as a stick in the forrest and someone poisoned him and now all he can say is ‘I am Groot’ and he farts out dust?” No, no my child, I did not know this. Thank you for bestowing this pearl upon me.