This year has been marked by the cases we haven't gotten done as much as the ones we did get done. In January my very good tooler and craftsman Lee Zhen Hai went home to use the money he had saved up after working with me for three years to open his own leather goods studio that's doing well now. This left a void with our ability to do high level tooling which we tried to fill by bringing in another very good tooler. But then he was newly married and his wife was homesick so they moved back to their hometown. In June/July we decided to grow our own so to speak and hired a couple guys interested in tooling but completely green. And we got lucky that another tooler with some experience came to work for us. So these three have been diligently practicing for many months and they are starting to get good.
This year has seen us grow from 10 to 18 as we have started to move into some mass production cases. (which I intend to move us out of as quickly as possible). Got lots of irons in the fire so speak and although it's hard to keep them all hot we have not done too badly.
I am happy with the Mason case series that has done well this year. I am happy with the Chas cases we just started doing. And I am especially proud of all Karen's work on the creative stamping. I think that we are now doing some complicated stamping and dying work on cases that hasn't really been seen much on cue cases. This has the effect of allowing us to create interesting designs much the same as a cue maker does and change them up just by virtue of how they are dyed and colored.
So to those of you who have extended your incredible patience on the cases we have not yet finished, I thank you more than I can repay you for your generosity. But I will try to repay you handsomely for being willing to wait while we rebuild our ability to do the complicated case designs.
In the meantime this is what we have done in 2011 in no particular order:
This year has seen us grow from 10 to 18 as we have started to move into some mass production cases. (which I intend to move us out of as quickly as possible). Got lots of irons in the fire so speak and although it's hard to keep them all hot we have not done too badly.
I am happy with the Mason case series that has done well this year. I am happy with the Chas cases we just started doing. And I am especially proud of all Karen's work on the creative stamping. I think that we are now doing some complicated stamping and dying work on cases that hasn't really been seen much on cue cases. This has the effect of allowing us to create interesting designs much the same as a cue maker does and change them up just by virtue of how they are dyed and colored.
So to those of you who have extended your incredible patience on the cases we have not yet finished, I thank you more than I can repay you for your generosity. But I will try to repay you handsomely for being willing to wait while we rebuild our ability to do the complicated case designs.
In the meantime this is what we have done in 2011 in no particular order:
