SPARTA
SPARTA, NJ; MARCH 2, 2006 — If I knew then what I know now, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a YH cap. But I’m not too bright. So, the caps are here. At least for now.
I now know that it’s hard to take a baseball cap from a hand-sketched concept to an actual prototype that you can touch and feel. But I had never done it before, so it seemed achievable at the time.
I now know that it is hard to arrange for an ocean freight to pick up your caps from an overseas manufacturer, route the shipment through open water and U.S. customs, before a truck delivers the caps to New Jersey. But I had no frame of reference, so it seemed like a fun challenge at the time.
I now know how impossible it is to have about $250 in your promotion budget, yet see your product voluntarily splashed across the nation by the media. I naively believed that some properly-placed, homemade press releases would do the trick. That, and pounding the pavement with one of just a few people on the planet who didn’t question the sanity of this venture in the beginning.
I now know how hard it is to catch lightning in a bottle. The type of lightning that occurs when one of baseball’s best-known pitchers, then one of its best-known sluggers, wears the cap for the simple sake of having fun. Without demanding one cent of compensation. Enough said.
I now know how hard it is to pack and ship your own orders. I now know how much harder it would have been without a beloved group of friends who rallied behind the cause and built a make-shift assembly line that banged out thousands of parcels over a few mad weeks, taking just enough breaks to down some cold beer and hot pizza.
I now know how revolting–yet flattering–it is to see a proliferation of unlabeled knock-off goods in merchants’ stores and on Ebay.
I now know how hard is to tangle with a fire-breathing dragon that has cash gushing from its scaly pores. And its prickly, combative sidekicks.
I am starting to realize how hard it is for one person and his financially-vulnerable business to survive the onslaught of the dragon and its posse.
I still have no clue about what it takes to slay the dragon. It’s probably best that I don’t know now what I will know later.
But, then again, you never know.
{Editors Note: Yeah, this is cryptic. That’s by design. Keep your eyes and ears open for more developments…}