WIRED Store Grand Opening Party

We took a few days to visit New York City this past weekend.



We visited the WIRED Store grand opening on Thursday night and went back on Saturday to get a closer look at everything. The party was crazy! The ground floor had a bar made of ice, and still it was hot from all of the body heat! It's a 3-story structure with lots of little rooms and alcoves. SleepPhones were on the bottom floor, and RunPhones were on the top floor. Lots of people, finger foods, alcohol, and very cool products. Since the party was at 7pm, and we didn't get to eat before, I stood by the food entrance and had a bit of everything.



Here are some pictures of various products. There were lots of retro themes.





While in the City, we met with Dr. Jordan Stern of BlueSleep, the comprehensive sleep center in the financial district. We met with Adil Soomro, a talented Harvard MBA to discuss business. And we visited the 5th Avenue Sleepy's where SleepPhones are offered in New York City. Apparently, SleepPhones are sold out at that location, but they have not been able to get clearance from central purchasing to sell any more yet. We'll keep working with central purchasing!

Choosing a Company Name - 5 Tips

One of the first steps in establishing a company is choosing a name. This is a critical step, greatly impacting marketing, operations, and ultimately, success.

1. Unique and memorable
   It doesn't need to be anything fancy, but it needs to be unique.
   Do a Google search on the name you choose. Ideally, nothing should show up. For example, I just looked up Mary's Cleaning Service, and all of the entries on the first page of Google were for different businesses. If you chose that name, someone looking for your business online may have a hard time finding it.
   
   
2. Easy to spell and pronounce
   When talking on the phone, it's much easier to just tell someone a name than to have to spell it for them. The spelling problem applies to pleural words and punctuations too.
   
   Jose Espinosa Graphics 'n Design might seem like a nice graphic design place, but it might run into some problems.
   
   • Is Jose with an accent or not?
     
   • Is is spelled Hosay or Jose?
     
   • Is is Espinoza or Espinosa?
     
   • Is there an "s" at the end of Graphics or not?
     
   • Is the "'n" spelled with the "'" or "and"? Can you even put an apostrophe on a credit card, and do you have to spell it out for the state registration?
     
   
   
3. Ranks low in the alphabet
   You'd be surprised how many lists are alphabetized. If you are listed near the top, you would have a better chance of being seen. If I'm going through a phone book, and there are 50 auto detailing places, I might only call the first 5 places.
   
   
4. Domain name is available in .com
   Even if you plan to be a local business, you need to have a .com presence. That means your company name needs to be available as a domain name.
   
   You don't want to have to be the company that puts a hyphen in their name because someone else has it. You don't want to be the one with the .net or .biz name because someone else has the .com.
   
   Once you buy the .com, you may also want to buy the .net, .biz, and .co. Plus, you will also want to buy any potential misspellings of your name.
   We have all of the following, for example, and they all redirect to the same place:
   sleepphones.com
   sleephones.com
   sheepphones.com
   sleepphone.com
   
   
5. Descriptive of your brand
   The bulk of what you do needs to be in the name. If you provide sewing services and alterations, you can't name your place Martha Baker Services, even if your last name is Baker. People will expect you to bake pies for them.
   
   If what you do is in the name, it would be much easier for people to remember you and what you do.
   
   

In retrospect, could we have chosen a better name for AcousticSheep, LLC? Probably. But we were new to this whole thing. I don't think we did too badly with the name. It's unique, memorable, tells people that we deal with acoustics, and invokes an image of our cute sheep. However, is it hard to spell. People try to spell it with two Cs and separate the words frequently. It is at the top of many lists because it starts with "a," and we definitely have the unique domain name.

Be sure to do research online for other company naming tips. I only listed the ones I feel are most important, but there are many other potential pitfalls and advice on brainstorming.

Dinner Party

Now that we're getting busier, I have to start delegating work! Besides, I'm not very good at many things. I'm okay at many things, which has gotten us by so far. But there comes a point in a business where it needs to start looking more professional.

We've retained a great graphic designer to make the nice brochures that people get now. And we have a packaging expert designing retail packaging. Our friend is our website designer now - she helped put together the RunPhones website and is now tweaking the SleepPhones website.

We have another friend doing PR for us now. I run out of things to say on Twitter and Facebook, so while I check them 2-3 times a day, I don't have much to say. He's much better at finding things to say and to spin things in a way to make it funny or more engaging. For example, I would have just said, "someone stole my cousin-in-law's SleepPhones in England." He said, "One wonders how thieves can sleep at night, but this thief likely will sleep fine thanks to illegally-acquired SleepPhones." See, now that's more like it.

All of this to say that with all of the new talent we have, we had to make sure they all meet each other. We held a dinner party last week and took a time-lapse video of the event. 4 hours condensed into 30 seconds.

Packaging Lessons Part 6

Printed boxes.

A lot of manufacturers have their own custom printed boxes. Of course, we'd like that, but it does add to the cost of each box. Plus, there is the fee to step up the printing too. The benefit to having a printed box is for retailers to more easily identify our boxes. We could just put stickers all of the boxes like we do right now, but that looks pretty unprofessional. We decided that the easiest way for us to put our name on the boxes is with tape. We're getting custom printed tape that says SleepPhones on it. We can then close boxes with that, and it would be quite easy to recognize. We could even put a strip of tape across a few sides to make it that much easier to find our boxes. Here's a pic of our 2” standard packing tape!

Packaging Lessons Part 5

We have some sample boxes from the box manufacturer right now. We're still tweaking the exact final sizes and designs. The bigger boxes are 44-ECT instead of the standard 32-ECT. The 44-ECT cardboard is thicker, but not quite to the doublewall size.

For a pallet, we would need to wrap the boxes with plastic wrap or strap them with thick bands. I looked around and the commercial plastic wraps all come in boxes of 4, even on eBay. I'm not sure we will be needing to pack our own pallets for more than a few months. We only have one order right now that requires pallets. I really don't want to buy a wrap dispenser ($50) and 4 giant rolls of wraps ($70). I even considered using kitchen Saran wrap. But then I stumbled across U-Haul's moving supplies. It turns out that they have single tubes of plastic wrap pre-packaged on a dispenser. And if you ordered $25 worth of stuff, they deliver it for free! So I ordered an 18” tube and a 5” tube. I'm excited that I found a great low-cost, no commitment solution for wrapping boxes on a pallet!

Packaging Lessons Part 4

I've been buying boxes from Uline's box stocks. They aren't custom, but they have so many sizes that I can usually find something that fits well enough. They are fast, shipping from about 2 hours away. Unfortunately, they don't have anything close to what I would need to minimize wasted packaging per the requirements of our manufacturer's rep. So I have to start using custom-size boxes.

If you've never noticed before, on the bottom of every corrugated box, there is a circle stamp with the box manufacturer's information. I looked around at what other business use locally and found a box manufacturer about 45 minutes away. They have been quite responsive, and the sales representative that called on us has stopped by a few times with lots of samples to try out, per my specifications.

The problem is my specifications. There are lots of details in box design!

There are the inside dimensions for the products. That's pretty obvious. The typical 32-ECT corrugated cardboard measures about 1/8 inch in thickness. The outside dimensions are usually 1/4 inch bigger. The sides that have the flap doubled would make that side 5/8 inch bigger. But then depending on how they put the box together, there's usually a tab along one edge that would need to be glued down. That makes that corner an extra 1/8 inch in thickness. Add up all of the little extras to get the final inner carton outside dimensions (which is different from one corner to the next actually).

Packing the inner cartons into a master carton involves the same process of determining the inside dimensions and then figuring out the outside dimensions. But wait! If you make things exact, you'll never be able to get the inner cartons out. If they are packed in too tightly, you create no space for air to move around, and trying to get an inner carton out would involve fighting a vacuum. So you have to add an extra eighth or quarter inch around.

As explained in the previous post about pallets, the outside box dimension is important for fitting things on a pallet. I calculated backwards from 48” final outside dimensions to figure out what size the the 6-pack box would need to be. Once I have all of these dimensions, the box manufacturer can finally make the boxes!

Business Cards

We're working with a talented graphic designer, Tara Tallman, who is a friend of friends. (We live in a relatively small community.) She designed my latest business card! I had no idea how to put RunPhones and SleepPhones on the same card without it looking tacky. But she totally pulled it off! RunPhones are in the white background, signifying daytime, and the SleepPhones are on the black background, signifying nighttime. Curved line makes everything soft, like our headphones. Very cool. It's the one on the right side.


In comparison, the previous card design was made by yours truly (on the left). It's supposed to depict a door hangtag - like the "Do Not Disturb" signs. Get it? No? Oh. Okay.